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T. TEMBAROM
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
CHAPTER I:
The boys at the Brooklyn public school which he attended did not know
what the "T." stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in
reply to questions was: "It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter
have a' 'nitial, ain't you?" His name was, in fact, an almost
inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and
pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became "Temp." His
surname was Barom, so he was at once "Temp Barom." In the natural
tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and
the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled
itself into "Tembarom," and there remained. By much less inevitable
processes have surnames evolved themselves as centuries rolled by.
Tembarom liked it, and soon almost forgot he had ever been called
anything else.
His education really began when he was ten years old. At that time
his mother died of pneumonia, contracted by going out to sew, at
seventy-five cents a day, in shoes almost entirely without soles,
when the remains of a blizzard were melting in the streets. As, after
her funeral, there remained only twenty-five cents in the shabby
bureau which was one of the few articles furnishing the room in the
tenement in which they lived together, Tembarom sleeping on a cot,
the world spread itself before him as a place to explore in search of
at least one meal a day. There was nothing to do but to explore it to
the best of his ten-year-old ability.
His father had died two years before his mother, and Tembarom had
vaguely felt it a relief. He had been a resentful, domestically
tyrannical immigrant Englishman, who held in contempt every American
trait and institution. He had come over to better himself, detesting
England and the English because there was "no chance for a man there,"
and, transferring his dislikes and resentments from one country to
another, had met with no better luck than he had left behind him.
This he felt to be the fault of America, and his family, which was
represented solely by Tembarom and his mother, heard a good deal
about it, and also, rather contradictorily, a good deal about the
advantages and superiority of England, to which in the course of six
months he became gloomily loyal. It was necessary, in fact, for him
to have something with which to compare the United States unfavorably.
The effect he produced on Tembarom was that of causing him, when he
entered the public school round the corner, to conceal with
determination verging on duplicity the humiliating fact that if he
had not been born in Brooklyn he might have been born in England.
England was not popular among the boys in the school. History had
represented the country to them in all its tyrannical rapacity and
bloodthirsty oppression of the humble free-born. The manly and
admirable attitude was to say, "Give me liberty or give me death"--
and there was the Fourth of July.
Though Tembarom and his mother had been poor enough while his father
lived, when he died the returns from his irregular odd jobs no longer
came in to supplement his wife's sewing, and add an occasional day or
two of fuller meals, in consequence of which they were oftener than
ever hungry and cold, and in desperate trouble about the rent of
their room. Tembarom, who was a wiry, enterprising little fellow,
sometimes found an odd job himself. He carried notes and parcels when
any one would trust him with them, he split old boxes into kindling-
wood, more than once he "minded" a baby when its mother left its
perambulator outside a store. But at eight or nine years of age one's
pay is in proportion to one's size. Tembarom, however, had neither
his father's bitter eye nor his mother's discouraged one. Something
different from either had been reincarnated in him from some more
cheerful past. He had an alluring grin instead--a grin which curled
up his mouth and showed his sound, healthy, young teeth,--a lot of
them,--and people liked to see them.
At the beginning of the world it is only recently reasonable to
suppose human beings were made with healthy bodies and healthy minds.
That of course was the original scheme of the race. It would not have
been worth while to create a lot of things aimlessly ill made. A
journeyman carpenter would not waste his time in doing it, if he knew
any better. Given the power to make a man, even an amateur would make
him as straight as he could, inside and out. Decent vanity would
compel him to do it. He would be ashamed to show the thing and admit
he had done it, much less people a world with millions of like proofs
of incompetence. Logically considered, the race was built straight
and clean and healthy and happy. How, since then, it has developed in
multitudinous less sane directions, and lost its normal straightness
and proportions, I am, singularly enough, not entirely competent to
explain with any degree of satisfactory detail. But it cannot be
truthfully denied that this has rather generally happened. There are
human beings who are not beautiful, there are those who are not
healthy, there are those who hate people and things with much waste
of physical and mental energy, there are people who are not unwilling
to do others an ill turn by word or deed, and there are those who do
not believe that the original scheme of the race was ever a decent
one.
This is all abnormal and unintelligent, even the not being beautiful,
and sometimes one finds oneself called upon passionately to resist a
temptation to listen to an internal hint that the whole thing is
aimless. Upon this tendency one may as well put one's foot firmly, as
it leads nowhere. At such times it is supporting to call to mind a
certain undeniable fact which ought to loom up much larger in our
philosophical calculations. No one has ever made a collection of
statistics regarding the enormous number of perfectly sane, kind,
friendly, decent creatures who form a large proportion of any mass of
human beings anywhere and everywhere--people who are not vicious or
cruel or depraved, not as a result of continual self-control, but
simply because they do not want to be, because it is more natural and
agreeable to be exactly the opposite things; people who do not tell
lies because they could not do it with any pleasure, and would, on
the contrary, find the exertion an annoyance and a bore; people whose
manners and morals are good because their natural preference lies in
that direction. There are millions of them who in most essays on life
and living are virtually ignored because they do none of the things
which call forth eloquent condemnation or brilliant cynicism. It has
not yet become the fashion to record them. When one reads a daily
newspaper filled with dramatic elaborations of crimes and
unpleasantness, one sometimes wishes attention might be called to
them --to their numbers, to their decencies, to their normal lack of
any desire to do violence and their equally normal disposition to
lend a hand. One is inclined to feel that the majority of persons do
not believe in their existence. But if an accident occurs in the
street, there are always several of them who appear to spring out of
the earth to give human sympathy and assistance; if a national
calamity, physical or social, takes place, the world suddenly seems
full of them. They are the thousands of Browns, Joneses, and
Robinsons who, massed together, send food to famine-stricken
countries, sustenance to earthquake-devastated regions, aid to
wounded soldiers or miners or flood-swept homelessness. They are the
ones who have happened naturally to continue to grow straight and
carry out the First Intention. They really form the majority; if they
did not, the people of the earth would have eaten one another alive
centuries ago. But though this is surely true, a happy cynicism
totally disbelieves in their existence. When a combination of
circumstances sufficiently dramatic brings one of them into
prominence, he is either called an angel or a fool. He is neither. He
is only a human creature who is normal.
After this manner Tembarom was wholly normal. He liked work and
rejoiced in good cheer, when he found it, however attenuated its form.
He was a good companion, and even at ten years old a practical
person. He took his loose coppers from the old bureau drawer, and
remembering that he had several times helped Jake Hutchins to sell
his newspapers, he went forth into the world to find and consult him
as to the investment of his capital.
"Where are you goin', Tem?" a woman who lived in the next room said
when she met him on the stairs. "What you goin' to do?"
"I'm goin' to sell newspapers if I can get some with this," he
replied, opening his hand to show her the extent of his resources.
She was almost as poor as he was, but not quite. She looked him over
curiously for a moment, and then fumbled in her pocket. She drew out
two ten-cent pieces and considered them, hesitating. Then she looked
again at him. That normal expression in his nice ten-year-old eyes
had its suggestive effect.
"You take this," she said, handing him the two pieces. "It'll help
you to start."
"I'll bring it back, ma'am," said Tem. "Thank you, Mis' Hullingworth."
In about two weeks' time he did bring it back. That was the beginning.
He lived through all the experiences a small boy waif and stray
would be likely to come in contact with. The abnormal class treated
him ill, and the normal class treated him well. He managed to get
enough food to eat to keep him from starvation. Sometimes he slept
under a roof and much oftener out-of-doors. He preferred to sleep out-
of-doors more than half of the year, and the rest of the time he did
what he could. He saw and learned many strange things, but was not
undermined by vice because he unconsciously preferred decency. He
sold newspapers and annexed any old job which appeared on the horizon.
The education the New York streets gave him was a liberal one. He
became accustomed to heat and cold and wet weather, but having sound
lungs and a tough little body combined with the normal tendencies
already mentioned, he suffered no more physical deterioration than a
young Indian would suffer. After selling newspapers for two years he
got a place as "boy" in a small store. The advance signified by
steady employment was inspiring to his energies. He forged ahead, and
got a better job and better pay as he grew older. By the time he was
fifteen he shared a small bedroom with another boy. In whatsoever
quarter he lived, friends seemed sporadic. Other boy's congregated
about him. He did not know he had any effect at all, but his effect,
in fact, was rather like that of a fire in winter or a cool breeze in
summer. It was natural to gather where it prevailed.
There came a time when he went to a night class to learn stenography.
Great excitement had been aroused among the boys he knew best by a
rumor that there were "fellows" who could earn a hundred dollars a
week "writing short." Boyhood could not resist the florid splendor of
the idea. Four of them entered the class confidently looking forward
to becoming the recipients of four hundred a month in the course of
six weeks. One by one they dropped off, until only Tembarom remained,
slowly forging ahead. He had never meant anything else but to get on
in the world--to get as far as he could. He kept at his "short," and
by the time he was nineteen it helped him to a place in a newspaper
office. He took dictation from a nervous and harried editor, who,
when he was driven to frenzy by overwork and incompetencies, found
that the long-legged, clean youth with the grin never added fuel to
the flame of his wrath. He was a common young man, who was not marked
by special brilliancy of intelligence, but he had a clear head and a
good temper, and a queer aptitude for being able to see himself in
the other man's shoes--his difficulties and moods. This ended in his
being tried with bits of new work now and then. In an emergency he
was once sent out to report the details of a fire. What he brought
back was usable, and his elation when he found he had actually "made
good" was ingenuous enough to spur Galton, the editor, into trying
him again.
To Tembarom this was a magnificent experience. The literary
suggestion implied by being "on a newspaper" was more than he had
hoped for. If you have sold newspapers, and slept in a barrel or
behind a pile of lumber in a wood-yard, to report a fire in a street-
car shed seems a flight of literature. He applied himself to the
careful study of newspapers--their points of view, their style of
phrasing. He believed them to be perfect. To attain ease in
expressing himself in their elevated language he felt to be the
summit of lofty ambition. He had no doubts of the exaltation of his
ideal. His respect and confidence almost made Galton cry at times,
because they recalled to him days when he had been nineteen and had
regarded New York journalists with reverence. He liked Tembarom more
and more. It actually soothed him to have him about, and he fell into
giving him one absurd little chance after another. When he brought in
"stuff" which bore too evident marks of utter ignorance, he actually
touched it up and used it, giving him an enlightening, ironical hint
or so. Tembarom always took the hints with gratitude. He had no
mistaken ideas of his own powers. Galton loomed up before him a sort
of god, and though the editor was a man with a keen, though wearied,
brain and a sense of humor, the situation was one naturally
productive of harmonious relations. He was of the many who
unknowingly came in out of the cold and stood in the glow of
Tembarom's warm fire, or took refuge from the heat in his cool breeze.
He did not know of the private, arduous study of journalistic style,
and it was not unpleasing to see that the nice young cub was
gradually improving. Through pure modest fear or ridicule, Tembarom
kept to himself his vaulting ambition. He practised reports of fires,
weddings, and accidents in his hall bedroom.
A hall bedroom in a third-rate boarding-house is not a cheerful place,
but when Tembarom vaguely felt this, he recalled the nights spent in
empty trucks and behind lumber-piles, and thought he was getting
spoiled by luxury. He told himself that he was a fellow who always
had luck. He did not know, neither did any one else, that his luck
would have followed him if he had lived in a coal-hole. It was the
concomitant of his normal build and outlook on life. Mrs. Bowse, his
hard-worked landlady, began by being calmed down by his mere bearing
when he came to apply for his room and board. She had a touch of
grippe, and had just emerged from a heated affray with a dirty cook,
and was inclined to battle when he presented himself. In a few
minutes she was inclined to battle no longer. She let him have the
room. Cantankerous restrictions did not ruffle him.
"Of course what you say GOES," he said, giving her his friendly grin.
"Any one that takes boarders has GOT to be careful. You're in for a
bad cold, ain't you?"
"I've got grippe again, that's what I've got," she almost snapped.
"Did you ever try Payson's 'G. Destroyer'? G stands for grippe, you
know. Catchy name, ain't it? They say the man that invented it got
ten thousand dollars for it. 'G. Destroyer.' You feel like you have
to find out what it means when you see it up on a boarding. I'm just
over grippe myself, and I've got half a bottle in my pocket. You
carry it about with you, and swallow one every half-hour. You just
try it. It set me right in no time."
He took the bottle out of his waistcoat pocket and handed it to her.
She took it and turned it over.
"You're awful good-natured,"--She hesitated,--"but I ain't going to
take your medicine. I ought to go and get some for myself. How much
does it cost?"
"It's on the bottle; but it's having to get it for yourself that's
the matter. You won't have time, and you'll forget it."
"That's true enough," said Mrs. Bowse, looking at him sharply. "I
guess you know something about boarding-houses."
"I guess I know something about trying to earn three meals a day--or
two of them. It's no merry jest, whichever way you do it."
CHAPTER II
When he took possession of his hall bedroom the next day and came
down to his first meal, all the boarders looked at him interestedly.
They had heard of the G. Destroyer from Mrs. Bowse, whose grippe had
disappeared. Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger looked at him because
they were about his own age, and shared a hall bedroom on his floor;
the young woman from the notion counter in a down-town department
store looked at him because she was a young woman; the rest of the
company looked at him because a young man in a hall bedroom might or
might not be noisy or objectionable, and the incident of the G.
Destroyer sounded good-natured. Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, the stout and
discontented Englishman from Manchester, looked him over because the
mere fact that he was a new-comer had placed him by his own rash act
in the position of a target for criticism. Mr. Hutchinson had come to
New York because he had been told that he could find backers among
profuse and innumerable multi- millionaires for the invention which
had been the haunting vision of his uninspiring life. He had not been
met with the careless rapture which had been described to him, and he
was becoming violently antagonistic to American capital and
pessimistic in his views of American institutions. Like Tembarom's
father, he was the resentful Englishman.
"I don't think much o' that chap," he said in what he considered an
undertone to his daughter, who sat beside him and tried to manage
that he should not be infuriated by waiting for butter and bread and
second helpings. A fine, healthy old feudal feeling that servants
should be roared at if they did not "look sharp" when he wanted
anything was one of his salient characteristics.
"Wait a bit, Father; we don't know anything about him yet," Ann
Hutchinson murmured quietly, hoping that his words had been lost in
the clatter of knives and forks and dishes.
As Tembarom had taken his seat, he had found that, when he looked
across the table, he looked directly at Miss Hutchinson; and before
the meal ended he felt that he was in great good luck to be placed
opposite an object of such singular interest. He knew nothing about
"types," but if he had been of those who do, he would probably have
said to himself that she was of a type apart. As it was, he merely
felt that she was of a kind one kept looking at whether one ought to
or not. She was a little thing of that exceedingly light slimness of
build which makes a girl a childish feather-weight. Few girls retain
it after fourteen or fifteen. A wind might supposably have blown her
away, but one knew it would not, because she was firm and steady on
her small feet. Ordinary strength could have lifted her with one hand,
and would have been tempted to do it. She had a slim, round throat,
and the English daisy face it upheld caused it to suggest to the mind
the stem of a flower. The roundness of her cheek, in and out of which
totally unexpected dimples flickered, and the forget-me-not blueness
of her eyes, which were large and rather round also, made her look
like a nice baby of singularly serious and observing mind. She looked
at one as certain awe-inspiring things in perambulators look at one--
with a far and clear silence of gaze which passes beyond earthly
obstacles and reserves a benign patience with follies. Tembarom felt
interestedly that one really might quail before it, if one had
anything of an inferior quality to hide. And yet it was not a
critical gaze at all. She wore a black dress with a bit of white
collar, and she had so much soft, red hair that he could not help
recalling one or two women who owned the same quantity and seemed
able to carry it only as a sort of untidy bundle. Hers looked
entirely under control, and yet was such a wonder of burnished
fullness that it tempted the hand to reach out and touch it. It
became Tembarom's task during the meal to keep his eyes from turning
too often toward it and its owner.
If she had been a girl who took things hard, she might have taken her
father very hard indeed. But opinions and feelings being solely a
matter of points of view, she was very fond of him, and, regarding
him as a sacred charge and duty, took care of him as though she had
been a reverentially inclined mother taking care of a boisterous son.
When his roar was heard, her calm little voice always fell quietly on
indignant ears the moment it ceased. It was her part in life to act
as a palliative: her mother, whose well-trained attitude toward the
ruling domestic male was of the early Victorian order, had lived and
died one. A nicer, warmer little woman had never existed. Joseph
Hutchinson had adored and depended on her as much as he had harried
her. When he had charged about like a mad bull because he could not
button his collar, or find the pipe he had mislaid in his own pocket,
she had never said more than "Now, Mr. Hutchinson," or done more than
leave her sewing to button the collar with soothing fingers, and
suggest quietly that sometimes he DID chance to carry his pipe about
with him. She was of the class which used to call its husband by a
respectful surname. When she died she left him as a sort of legacy to
her daughter, spending the last weeks of her life in explaining
affectionately all that "Father" needed to keep him quiet and make
him comfortable.
Little Ann had never forgotten a detail, and had even improved upon
some of them, as she happened to be cleverer than her mother, and had,
indeed, a far-seeing and clear young mind of her own. She had been
called "Little Ann" all her life. This had held in the first place
because her mother's name had been Ann also, and after her mother's
death the diminutive had not fallen away from her. People felt it
belonged to her not because she was especially little, though she was
a small, light person, but because there was an affectionate humor in
the sound of it.
Despite her hard needs, Mrs. Bowse would have faced the chance of
losing two boarders rather than have kept Mr. Joseph Hutchinson but
for Little Ann. As it was, she kept them both, and in the course of
three months the girl was Little Ann to almost every one in the house.
Her normalness took the form of an instinct which amounted to genius
for seeing what people ought to have, and in some occult way filling
in bare or trying places.
"She's just a wonder, that girl," Mrs. Bowse said to one boarder
after another.
"She's just a wonder," Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger murmured to
each other in rueful confidence, as they tilted their chairs against
the wall of their hall bedroom and smoked. Each of the shabby and
poverty-stricken young men had of course fallen hopelessly in love
with her at once. This was merely human and inevitable, but realizing
in the course of a few weeks that she was too busy taking care of her
irritable, boisterous old Manchester father, and everybody else, to
have time to be made love to even by young men who could buy new
boots when the old ones had ceased to be water-tight, they were
obliged to resign themselves to the, after all, comforting fact that
she became a mother to them, not a sister. She mended their socks and
sewed buttons on for them with a firm frankness which could not be
persuaded into meaning anything more sentimental than a fixed habit
of repairing anything which needed it, and which, while at first
bewildering in its serenity, ended by reducing the two youths to a
dust of devotion.
"She's a wonder, she is," they sighed when at every weekend they
found their forlorn and scanty washing resting tidily on their bed.
In the course of a week, more or less, Tembarom's feeling for her
would have been exactly that of his two hall-bedroom neighbors, but
that his nature, though a practical one, was not inclined to any
supine degree of resignation. He was a sensible youth, however, and
gave no trouble. Even Joseph Hutchinson, who of course resented
furiously any "nonsense" of which his daughter and possession was the
object, became sufficiently mollified by his good spirits and ready
good nature to refrain from open conversational assault.
"I don't mind that chap as much as I did at first," he admitted
reluctantly to Little Ann one evening after a good dinner and a
comfortable pipe. "He's not such a fool as he looks."
Tembarom was given, as Little Ann was, to seeing what people wanted.
He knew when to pass the mustard and other straying condiments. He
picked up things which. dropped inconveniently, he did not interrupt
the remarks of his elders and betters, and several times when he
chanced to be in the hall, and saw Mr. Hutchinson, in irritable,
stout Englishman fashion, struggling into his overcoat, he sprang
forward with a light, friendly air and helped him. 'He did not do it
with ostentatious politeness or with the manner of active youth
giving generous aid to elderly avoirdupois. He did it as though it
occurred to him as a natural result of being on the spot.
It took Mrs. Bowse and her boarding-house less than a week definitely
to like him. Every night when he sat down to dinner he brought news
with him- news and jokes and new slang. Newspaper-office anecdote and
talk gave a journalistic air to the gathering when he was present,
and there was novelty in it. Soon every one was intimate with him,
and interested in what he was doing. Galton's good-natured patronage
of him was a thing to which no one was indifferent. It was felt to be
the right thing in the right place. When he came home at night it
became the custom to ask him questions as to the bits of luck which
befell him. He became " T. T." instead of Mr. Tembarom, except to
Joseph Hutchinson and his 'daughter. Hutchinson called him Tembarom,
but Little Ann said " Mr. Tembarom " with quaint frequency when she
spoke to him.
"Landed anything to-day, T. T. ? " some one would ask almost every
evening, and the interest in his relation of the day's adventures
increased from week to week. Little Ann never asked questions and
seldom made comments, but she always listened attentively. She had
gathered, and guessed from what she had gathered, a rather definite
idea of what his hard young life had been. He did not tell pathetic
stories about himself, but he and Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger
had become fast friends, and the genial smoking of cheap tobacco in
hall bedrooms tends to frankness of relation, and the various ways in
which each had found himself "up against it" in the course of their
brief years supplied material for anecdotal talk.
"But it's bound to be easier from now on," he would say. "I've got
the 'short' down pretty fine - not fine enough to make big money, but
enough to hold down a job with Galton. He's mighty good to me. If I
knew more, I believe he'd give me a column to take care of--Up-town
Society column perhaps. A fellow named Biker's got it. Twenty per.
Goes on a bust twice a month, the fool. Gee! I wish I had his job!"
Mrs. Bowse's house was provided with a parlor in which her boarders
could sit in the evening when so inclined. It was a fearsome room,
which, when the dark, high-ceilinged hall was entered, revealed
depths of dingy gloom which appeared splashed in spots with
incongruous brilliancy of color. This effect was produced by richly
framed department-store chromo lithographs on the walls, aided by
lurid cushion-covers, or "tidies" representing Indian maidens or
chieftains in full war paint, or clusters of poppies of great
boldness of hue. They had either been Christmas gifts bestowed upon
Mrs. Bowse or department-store bargains of her own selection,
purchased with thrifty intent. The red-and-green plush upholstered
walnut chairs arid sofa had been acquired by her when the bankruptcy
of a neighboring boarding-house brought them within her means. They
were no longer very red or very green, and the cheerfully hopeful
design of the tidies and cushions had been to conceal worn places and
stains. The mantelpiece was adorned by a black-walnut-and-gold-framed
mirror, and innumerable vases of the ornate ninety-eight-cents order.
The centerpiece held a large and extremely soiled spray of artificial
wistaria. The end of the room was rendered attractive by a tent-like
cozy-corner built of savage weapons and Oriental cotton stuffs long
ago become stringy and almost leprous in hue. The proprietor of the
bankrupt boarding-house had been "artistic." But Mrs. Bowse was a
good-enough soul whose boarders liked her and her house, and when the
gas was lighted and some one played "rag-time" on the second-hand
pianola, they liked the parlor.
Little Ann did not often appear in it, but now and then she came down
with her bit of sewing,--she always had a "bit of sewing,"--and she
sat in the cozy-corner listening to the talk or letting some one
confide troubles to her. Sometimes it was the New England widow, Mrs.
Peck, who looked like a spinster school-ma'am, but who had a married
son with a nice wife who lived in Harlem and drank heavily. She used
to consult with Little Ann as to the possible wisdom of putting a
drink deterrent privately in his tea. Sometimes it was Mr. Jakes, a
depressed little man whose wife had left him, for no special reason
he could discover. Oftenest perhaps it was Julius Steinberger or Jim
Bowles who did their ingenuous best to present themselves to her as
energetic, if not successful, young business men, not wholly unworthy
of attention and always breathing daily increasing devotion.
Sometimes it was Tembarom, of whom her opinion had never been
expressed, but who seemed to have made friends with her. She liked to
hear about the newspaper office and Mr. Galton, and never was
uninterested in his hopes of "making good." She seemed to him the
wisest and most direct and composed person he had ever known. She
spoke with the broad, flat, friendly Manchester accent, and when she
let drop a suggestion, it carried a delightfully sober conviction
with it, because what she said was generally a revelation of logical
mental argument concerning details she had gathered through her
little way of listening and saying nothing whatever.
"If Mr. Biker drinks, he won't keep his place," she said to Tembarom
one night. "Perhaps you might get it yourself, if you persevere."
Tembarom reddened a little. He really reddened through joyous
excitement.
"Say, I didn't know you knew a thing about that," he answered.
"You're a regular wonder. You scarcely ever say anything, but the way
you get on to things gets me."
"Perhaps if I talked more I shouldn't notice as much," she said,
turning her bit of sewing round and examining it. "I never was much
of a talker. Father's a good talker, and Mother and me got into the
way of listening. You do if you live with a good talker."
Tembarom looked at the girl with a male gentleness, endeavoring to
subdue open expression of the fact that he was convinced that she was
as thoroughly aware of her father's salient characteristics as she
was of other things.
"You do," said Tembarom. Then picking up her scissors, which had
dropped from her lap, and politely returning them, he added anxiously:
"To think of you remembering Biker! I wonder, if I ever did get his
job, if I could hold it down?"
"Yes," decided Little Ann; "you could. I've noticed you're that kind
of person, Mr. Tembarom."
"Have you?" he said elatedly. "Say, honest Injun?"
"Yes."
"I shall be getting stuck on myself if you encourage me like that,"
he said, and then, his face falling, he added, "Biker graduated at
Princeton."
"I don't know much about society," Little Ann remarked,-- "I never
saw any either up-town or down-town or in the country, --but I
shouldn't think you'd have to have a college education to write the
things you see about it in the newspaper paragraphs."
Tembarom grinned.
"They're not real high-brow stuff, are they," he said. "'There was a
brilliant gathering on Tuesday evening at the house of Mr. Jacob
Sturtburger at 79 Two Hundredth Street on the occasion of the
marriage of his daughter Miss Rachel Sturtburger to Mr. Eichenstein.
The bride was attired in white peau de cygne trimmed with duchess
lace.'"
Little Ann took him up. "I don't know what peau de cygne is, and I
daresay the bride doesn't. I've never been to anything but a village
school, but I could make up paragraphs like that myself."
"That's the up-town kind," said Tembarom. "The down-town ones wear
their mothers' point-lace wedding-veils some-times, but they're not
much different. Say, I believe I could do it if I had luck."
"So do I," returned Little Ann.
Tembarom looked down at the carpet, thinking the thing over. Ann went
on sewing.
"That's the way with you," he said presently: "you put things into a
fellow's head. You've given me a regular boost, Little Ann."
It is not unlikely that but for the sensible conviction in her voice
he would have felt less bold when, two weeks later, Biker, having
gone upon a "bust " too prolonged, was dismissed with-out benefit of
clergy, and Galton desperately turned to Tembarom with anxious
question in his eye.
"Do you think you could take this job?" he said.
Tembarom's heart, as he believed at the time, jumped into his throat.
"What do you think, Mr. Galton?" he asked.
"It isn't a thing to think about," was Galton's answer. "It's a
thing I must be sure of."
"Well," said Tembarom, "if you give it to me, I'll put up a mighty
hard fight before I fall down."
Galton considered him, scrutinizing keenly his tough, long-built body,
his sharp, eager, boyish face, and especially his companionable grin.
"We'll let it go at that," he decided. "You'll make friends up in
Harlem, and you won't find it hard to pick up news. We can at least
try it."
Tembarom's heart jumped into his throat again, and he swallowed it
once more. He was glad he was not holding his hat in his hand because
he knew he would have forgotten himself and thrown it up into the air.
"Thank you, Mr. Galton," he said, flushing tremendously. "I'd like to
tell you how I appreciate your trusting me, but I don't know how.
Thank you, sir."
When he appeared in Mrs. Bowse's dining-room that evening there was a
glow of elation about him and a swing in his entry which attracted
all eyes at once. For some unknown reason everybody looked at him,
and, meeting his eyes, detected the presence of some new exultation.
"Landed anything, T. T.?" Jim Bowles cried out. "You look it."
"Sure I look it," Tembarom answered, taking his napkin out of its
ring with an unconscious flourish. "I've landed the up-town society
page--landed it, by gee!"
A good-humored chorus of ejaculatory congratulation broke forth all
round the table.
"Good business!" "Three cheers for T. T.!" "Glad of it!" "Here's
luck!"
said one after another.
They were all pleased, and it was generally felt that Galton had
shown sense and done the right thing again. Even Mr. Hutchinson
rolled about in his chair and grunted his approval.
After dinner Tembarom, Jim Bowles, and Julius Steinberger went up-
stairs together and filled the hall bedroom with clouds of tobacco-
smoke, tilting their chairs against the wall, smoking their pipes
furiously, flushed and talkative, working themselves up with the
exhilarated plannings of youth. Jim Bowles and Julius had been down
on their luck for several weeks, and that "good old T. T." should
come in with this fairy-story was an actual stimulus. If you have
never in your life been able to earn more than will pay for your food
and lodging, twenty dollars looms up large. It might be the beginning
of anything.
"First thing is to get on to the way to do it," argued Tembarom. "I
don't know the first thing. I've got to think it out. I couldn't ask
Biker. He wouldn't tell me, anyhow."
"He's pretty mad, I guess," said Steinberger.
"Mad as hops," Tembarom answered. "As I was coming down-stairs from
Galton's room he was standing in the hall talking to Miss Dooley, and
he said: `That Tembarom fellow's going to do it! He doesn't know how
to spell. I should like to see his stuff come in.' He said it loud,
because he wanted me to hear it, and he sort of laughed through his
nose."
"Say, T. T., can you spell?" Jim inquired thoughtfully.
"Spell? Me? No," Tembarom owned with unshaken good cheer. "What I've
got to do is to get a tame dictionary and keep it chained to the leg
of my table. Those words with two m's or two l's in them get me right
down on the mat. But the thing that looks biggest to me is how to
find out where the news is, and the name of the fellow that'll put me
on to it. You can't go up a man's front steps and ring the bell and
ask him if he's going to be married or buried or have a pink tea."
"Wasn't that a knock at the door?" said Steinberger.
It was a knock, and Tembarom jumped up and threw the door open,
thinking Mrs. Bowse might have come on some household errand. But it
was Little Ann Hutchinson instead of Mrs. Bowse, and there was a
threaded needle stuck into the front of her dress, and she had on a
thimble.
"I want Mr. Bowles's new socks," she said maternally. "I promised I'd
mark them for him."
Bowles and Steinberger sprang from their chairs, and came forward in
the usual comfortable glow of pleasure at sight of her.
"What do you think of that for all the comforts of a home?" said
Tembarom. "As if it wasn't enough for a man to have new socks without
having marks put on them! What are your old socks made of anyhow--
solid gold? Burglars ain't going to break in and steal them."
"They won't when I've marked them, Mr. Tembarom," answered Little Ann,
looking up at him with sober, round, for-get-me-not blue eyes, but
with a deep dimple breaking out near her lip; "but all three pairs
would not come home from the wash if I didn't."
"Three pairs!" ejaculated Tembarom. "He's got three pairs of socks!
New? That's what's been the matter with him for the last week. Don't
you mark them for him, Little Ann. 'Tain't good for a man to have
everything."
"Here they are," said Jim, bringing them forward. "Twenty-five marked
down to ten at Tracy's. Are they pretty good?"
Little Ann looked them over with the practised eye of a connoisseur
of bargains.
"They'd be about a shilling in Manchester shops," she decided, "and
they might be put down to sixpence. They're good enough to take care
of."
She was not the young woman who is ready for prolonged lively
conversation in halls and at bedroom doors, and she had turned away
with the new socks in her hand when Tembarom, suddenly inspired,
darted after her.
"Say, I've just thought of something," he exclaimed eagerly. "It's
something I want to ask you."
"What is it?"
"It's about the society-page lay-out." He hesitated. "I wonder if
it'd be rushing you too much if --say," he suddenly broke off, and
standing with his hands in his pockets, looked down at her with
anxious admiration, "I believe you just know about everything."
"No, I don't, Mr. Tembarom; but I'm very glad about the page.
Everybody's glad."
One of the chief difficulties Tembarom found facing him when he
talked to Little Ann was the difficulty of resisting an awful
temptation to take hold of her--to clutch her to his healthy,
tumultuous young breast and hold her there firmly. He was half
ashamed of himself when he realized it, but he knew that his venial
weakness was shared by Jim Bowles and Steinberger and probably others.
She was so slim and light and soft, and the serious frankness of her
eyes and the quaint air of being a sort of grown-up child of
astonishing intelligence produced an effect it was necessary to
combat with.
"What I wanted to say," he put it to her, "was that I believe if
you'd just let me talk this thing out to you it'd do me good. I
believe you'd help me to get somewhere. I've got to fix up a scheme
for getting next the people who have things happening to them that I
can make society stuff out of, you know. Biker didn't make a hit of
it, but, gee! I've just got to. I've got to."
"Yes," answered Little Ann, her eyes fixed on him thoughtfully;
"you've got to, Mr. Tembarom."
"There's not a soul in the parlor. Would you mind coming down and
sitting there while I talk at you and try to work things out? You
could go on with your marking."
She thought it over a minute.
"I'll do it if Father can spare me," she made up her mind. "I'll go
and ask him."
She went to ask him, and returned in two or three minutes with her
small sewing-basket in her hand.
"He can spare me," she said. "He's reading his paper, and doesn't
want to talk."
They went down-stairs together and found the room empty. Tembarom
turned up the lowered gas, and Little Ann sat down in the cozy-corner
with her work-basket on her knee. Tembarom drew up a chair and sat
down opposite to her. She threaded a needle and took up one of Jim's
new socks.
"Now," she said.
"It's like this," he explained. "The page is a new deal, anyhow.
There didn't used to be an up-town society column at all. It was all
Fifth Avenue and the four hundred; but ours isn't a fashionable paper,
and their four hundred ain't going to buy it to read their names in
it. They'd rather pay to keep out of it. Uptown's growing like smoke,
and there's lots of people up that way that'd like their friends to
read about their weddings and receptions, and would buy a dozen
copies to send away when their names were in. There's no end of women
and girls that'd like to see their clothes described and let their
friends read the descriptions. They'd buy the paper, too, you bet.
It'll be a big circulation-increaser. It's Galton's idea, and he gave
the job to Biker because he thought an educated fellow could get hold
of people. But somehow he couldn't. Seems as if they didn't like him.
He kept getting turned down. The page has been mighty poor-- no
pictures of brides or anything. Galton's been sick over it. He'd been
sure it'd make a hit. Then Biker's always drinking more or less, and
he's got the swell head, anyhow. I believe that's the reason he
couldn't make good with the up-towners."
"Perhaps he was too well educated, Mr. Tembarom," said Little Ann.
She was marking a letter J in red cotton, and her outward attention
was apparently wholly fixed on her work.
"Say, now," Tembarom broke out, "there's where you come in. You go on
working as if there was nothing but that sock in New York, but I
guess you've just hit the dot. Perhaps that was it. He wanted to do
Fifth Avenue work anyway, and he didn't go at Harlem right. He put on
Princeton airs when he asked questions. Gee! a fellow can't put on
any kind of airs when he's the one that's got to ask."
"You'll get on better," remarked Little Ann. "You've got a friendly
way and you've a lot of sense. I've noticed it."
Her head was bent over the red J and she still looked at it and not
at Tembarom. This was not coyness, but simple, calm absorption. If
she had not been making the J, she would have sat with her hands
folded in her lap, and gazed at the young man with undisturbed
attention.
"Have you?" said Tembarom, gratefully. "That gives me another boost,
Little Ann. What a man seems to need most is just plain twenty-cents-
a-yard sense. Not that I ever thought I had the dollar kind. I'm not
putting on airs."
"Mr. Galton knows the kind you have. I suppose that's why he gave you
the page." The words, spoken in the shrewd-sounding Manchester accent,
were neither flattering nor unflattering; they were merely impartial.
"Well, now I've got it, I can't fall down," said Tembarom. "I've got
to find out for myself how to get next to the people I want to talk
to. I've got to find out who to get next to."
Little Ann put in the final red stitch of the letter J and laid the
sock neatly folded on the basket.
"I've just been thinking something, Mr. Tembarom," she said. "Who
makes the wedding-cakes?"
He gave a delighted start.
"Gee!" he broke out, "the wedding-cakes!"
"Yes," Little Ann proceeded, "they'd have to have wedding-cakes, and
perhaps if you went to the shops where they're sold and could make
friends with the people, they'd tell you whom they were selling them
to, and you could get the addresses and go and find out things."
Tembarom, glowing with admiring enthusiasm, thrust out his hand.
"Little Ann, shake! " he said. " You've given me the whole show, just
like I thought you would. You're just the limit."
"Well, a wedding-cake's the next thing after the bride," she answered.
Her practical little head had given him the practical lead. The mere
wedding-cake opened up vistas. Confectioners supplied not only
weddings, but refreshments for receptions and dances. Dances
suggested the "halls" in which they were held. You could get
information at such places. Then there were the churches, and the
florists who decorated festal scenes. Tembarom's excitement grew as
he talked. One plan led to another; vistas opened on all sides. It
all began to look so easy that he could not understand how Biker
could possibly have gone into such a land of promise, and returned
embittered and empty-handed.
"He thought too much of himself and too little of other people,"
Little Ann summed him up in her unsevere, reasonable voice. "That's
so silly."
Tembarom tried not to look at her affectionately, but his voice was
affectionate as well as admiring, despite him.
"The way you get on to a thing just in three words!" he said. "Daniel
Webster ain't in it."
"I dare say if you let the people in the shops know that you come
from a newspaper, it'll be a help," she went on with ingenuous
worldly wisdom. "They'll think it'll be a kind of advertisement. And
so it will. You get some neat cards printed with your name and Sunday
Earth on them."
"Gee!" Tembarom ejaculated, slapping his knee, "there's another! You
think of every darned thing, don't you?"
She stopped a moment to look at him.
"You'd have thought of it all yourself after a bit," she said. She
was not of those unseemly women whose intention it is manifestly to
instruct the superior man. She had been born in a small Manchester
street and trained by her mother, whose own training had evolved
through affectionately discreet conjugal management of Mr. Hutchinson.
"Never you let a man feel set down when you want him to see a thing
reasonable, Ann," she had said. "You never get on with them if you do.
They can't stand it. The Almighty seemed to make 'em that way.
They've always been masters, and it don't hurt any woman to let 'em
be, if she can help 'em to think reasonable. Just you make a man feel
comfortable in his mind and push him the reasonable way. But never
you shove him, Ann. If you do, he'll just get all upset-like. Me and
your father have been right-down happy together, but we never should
have been if I hadn't thought that out before we was married two
weeks. Perhaps it's the Almighty's will, though I never was as sure
of the Almighty's way of thinking as some are."
Of course Tembarom felt soothed and encouraged, though he belonged to
the male development which is not automatically infuriated at a
suspicion of female readiness of logic.
"Well, I might have got on to it in time," he answered, still trying
not to look affectionate, "but I've no time to spare. Gee! but I'm
glad you're here!"
"I sha'n't be here very long." There was a shade of patient regret in
her voice. "Father's got tired of trying America. He's been
disappointed too often. He's going back to England."
"Back to England!" Tembarom cried out forlornly, "Oh Lord! What shall
we all do without you, Ann?"
"You'll do as you did before we came," said Little Ann.
"No, we sha'n't. We can't. I can't anyhow." He actually got up from
his chair and began to walk about, with his hands thrust deep in his
pockets.
Little Ann began to put her first stitches into a red B. No human
being could have told what she thought.
"We mustn't waste time talking about that," she said. "Let us talk
about the page. There are dressmakers, you know. If you could make
friends with a dressmaker or two they'd tell you what the wedding
things were really made of. Women do like their clothes to be
described right."
CHAPTER III
His work upon the page began the following week. When the first
morning of his campaign opened with a tumultuous blizzard, Jim Bowles
and Julius Steinberger privately sympathized with him as they dressed
in company, but they heard him whistling in his own hall bedroom as
he put on his clothes, and to none of the three did it occur that
time could be lost because the weather was inhuman. Blinding snow was
being whirled through the air by a wind which had bellowed across the
bay, and torn its way howling through the streets, maltreating people
as it went, snatching their breath out of them, and leaving them
gaspingly clutching at hats and bending their bodies before it.
Street-cars went by loaded from front to back platform, and were
forced from want of room to whizz heartlessly by groups waiting
anxiously at street corners.
Tembarom saw two or three of them pass in this way, leaving the
waiting ones desperately huddled together behind them. He braced
himself and whistled louder as he buttoned his celluloid collar.
"I'm going to get up to Harlem all the same," he said. "The 'L' will
be just as jammed, but there'll be a place somewhere, and I'll get
it."
His clothes were the outwardly decent ones of a young man who must
perforce seek cheap clothing-stores, and to whom a ten-dollar "hand-
me-down" is a source of exultant rejoicing. With the aid of great
care and a straight, well-formed young body, he managed to make the
best of them; but they were not to be counted upon for warmth even in
ordinarily cold weather. His overcoat was a specious covering, and
was not infrequently odorous of naphtha.
"You've got to know something about first aid to the wounded if you
live on ten per," he had said once to Little Ann. "A suit of clothes
gets to be an emergency-case mighty often if it lasts three years."
"Going up to Harlem to-day, T. T.?" his neighbor at table asked him
as he sat down to breakfast.
"Right there," he answered. "I've ordered the limousine round, with
the foot-warmer and fur rugs."
"I guess a day wouldn't really matter much," said Mrs. Bowse, good-
naturedly. "Perhaps it might be better to-morrow."
"And perhaps it mightn't," said Tembarom, eating "break-fast-food"
with a cheerful appetite. "What you can't be stone-cold sure of to-
morrow you drive a nail in to-day."
He ate a tremendous breakfast as a discreet precautionary measure.
The dark dining-room was warm, and the food was substantial. It was
comfortable in its way.
"You'd better hold the hall door pretty tight when you go out, and
don't open it far," said Mrs. Bowse as he got up to go. "There's wind
enough to upset things."
Tembarom went out in the hall, and put on his insufficient overcoat.
He buttoned it across his chest, and turned its collar up to his ears.
Then he bent down to turn up the bottoms of his trousers.
"A pair of arctics would be all to the merry right here," he said,
and then he stood upright and saw Little Ann coming down the
staircase holding in her hand a particularly ugly tar-tan-plaid
woolen neck-scarf of the kind known in England as a "comforter."
"If you are going out in this kind of weather," she said in her
serene, decided little voice, "you'd better wrap this comforter right
round your neck, Mr. Tembarom. It's one of Father's, and he can spare
it because he's got another, and, besides, he's not going out."
Tembarom took it with a sudden emotional perception of the fact that
he was being taken care of in an abnormally luxurious manner.
"Now, I appreciate that," he said. "The thing about you. Little Ann,
is that you never make a wrong guess about what a fellow needs, do
you?"
"I'm too used to taking care of Father not to see things," she
answered.
"What you get on to is how to take care of the whole world --initials
on a fellow's socks and mufflers round his neck." His eyes looked
remarkably bright.
"If a person were taking care of the whole world, he'd have a lot to
do," was her sedate reception of the remark. "You'd better put that
twice round your neck, Mr. Tembarom."
She put up her hand to draw the end of the scarf over his shoulder,
and Tembarom stood still at once, as though he were a little boy
being dressed for school. He looked down at her round cheek, and
watched one of the unexpected dimples reveal itself in a place where
dimples are not usually anticipated. It was coming out because she
was smiling a small, observing smile. It was an almost exciting thing
to look at, and he stood very still indeed. A fellow who did not own
two pairs of boots would be a fool not to keep quiet.
"You haven't told me I oughtn't to go out till the blizzard lets up,"
he said presently.
"No, I haven't, Mr. Tembarom," she answered. "You're one of the kind
that mean to do a thing when they've made up their minds. It'll be a
nice bit of money if you can keep the page."
"Galton said he'd give me a chance to try to make good," said
Tembarom. "And if it's the hit he thinks it ought to be, he'll raise
me ten. Thirty per. Vanastorbilts won't be in it. I think I'll get
married," he added, showing all his attractive teeth at once.
"I wouldn't do that," she said. "It wouldn't be enough to depend on.
New York's an expensive place."
She drew back and looked him over. "That'll keep you much warmer,"
she decided. "Now you can go. I've been looking in the telephone-book
for confectioners, and I've written down these addresses." She handed
him a slip of paper.
Tembarom caught his breath.
"Hully gee!" he exclaimed, "there never were TWO of you made! One
used up all there was of it. How am I going to thank you, anyhow!"
"I do hope you'll be able to keep the page," she said. "I do that, Mr.
Tembarom."
If there had been a touch of coquetry in her earnest, sober, round,
little face she would have been less distractingly alluring, but
there was no shade of anything but a sort of softly motherly anxiety
in the dropped note of her voice, and it was almost more than flesh
and blood at twenty-five could stand. Tembarom made a hasty,
involuntary move toward her, but it was only a slight one, and it was
scarcely perceptible before he had himself in hand and hurriedly
twisted his muffler tighter, showing his teeth again cheerily.
"You keep on hoping it all day without a let-up," he said. "And tell
Mr. Hutchinson I'm obliged to him, please. Get out of the way, Little
Ann, while I go out. The wind might blow you and the hat-stand up-
stairs."
He opened the door and dashed down the high steps into the full blast
of the blizzard. He waited at the street corner while three
overcrowded cars whizzed past him, ignoring his signals because there
was not an inch of space left in them for another passenger. Then he
fought his way across two or three blocks to the nearest "L" station.
He managed to wedge himself into a train there, and then at least he
was on his way. He was thinking hard and fast, but through all his
planning the warm hug of the tartan comforter round his neck kept
Little Ann near him. He had been very thankful for the additional
warmth as the whirling snow and wind had wrought their will with him
while he waited for the cars at the street corner. On the "L" train
he saw her serious eyes and heard the motherly drop in her voice as
she said, "I do hope you'll be able to keep the page. I do that, Mr.
Tembarom." It made him shut his hands hard as they hung in his
overcoat pockets for warmth, and it made him shut his sound teeth
strongly.
"Gee! I've got to!" his thoughts said for him. "If I make it, perhaps
my luck will have started. When a man's luck gets started, every
darned thing's to the good."
The "L" had dropped most of its crowd when it reached the up-town
station among the hundredth streets which was his destination. He
tightened his comforter, tucked the ends firmly into the front of his
overcoat, and started out along the platform past the office, and
down the steep, iron steps, already perilous with freezing snow. He
had to stop to get his breath when he reached the street, but he did
not stop long. He charged forth again along the pavement, looking
closely at the shop-windows. There were naturally but few passers-by,
and the shops were not important-looking; but they were open, and he
could see that the insides of them looked comfortable in contrast
with the blizzard-ruled street. He could not see both sides of the
street as he walked up one side of the block without coming upon a
confectioner's. He crossed at the corner and turned back on the other
side. Presently he saw that a light van was standing before one place,
backed up against the sidewalk to receive parcels, its shuddering
horse holding its head down and bracing itself with its forelegs
against the wind. At any rate, something was going on there, and he
hurried forward to find out what it was. The air was so thick with
myriads of madly flying bits of snow, which seemed whirled in all
directions in the air, that he could not see anything definite even a
few yards away. When he reached the van he found that he had also
reached his confectioner. The sign over the window read "M. Munsberg,
Confectionery. Cakes. Ice-Cream. Weddings, Balls and Receptions."
"Made a start, anyhow," said Tembarom.
He turned into the store, opening the door carefully, and thereby
barely escaping being blown violently against a stout, excited,
middle-aged little Jew who was bending over a box he was packing.
This was evidently Mr. Munsberg, who was extremely busy, and even the
modified shock upset his temper.
"Vhere you goin'?" he cried out. "Can't you look vhere you're goin'?"
Tembarom knew this was not a good beginning, but his natural mental
habit of vividly seeing the other man's point of view helped him
after its usual custom. His nice grin showed itself.
"I wasn't going; I was coming," he said. "Beg pardon. The wind's
blowing a hundred miles an hour."
A good-looking young woman, who was probably Mrs. Munsberg, was
packing a smaller box behind the counter. Tembarom lifted his hat,
and she liked it.
"He didn't do it a bit fresh," she said later. "Kind o' nice." She
spoke to him with professional politeness.
"Is there anything you want?" she asked.
Tembarom glanced at the boxes and packages standing about and at
Munsberg, who had bent over his packing again. Here was an occasion
for practical tact.
"I've blown in at the wrong time," he said. "You're busy getting
things out on time. I'll just wait.. Gee! I'm glad to be inside. I
want to speak to Mr. Munsberg."
Mr. Munsberg jerked himself upright irascibly, and broke forth in the
accent of the New York German Jew.
"If you comin' in here to try to sell somedings, young man, joost you
let that same vind vat blew you in blow you right out pretty quick.
I'm not buyin' nodings. I'm busy."
"I'm not selling a darned thing," answered Tembarom, with undismayed
cheer.
"You vant someding?" jerked out Munsberg.
"Yes, I want something," Tembarom answered, " but it's nothing any
one has to pay for. I'm only a newspaper man." He felt a glow of
pride as he said the words. He was a newspaper man even now. "Don't
let me stop you a minute. I'm in luck to get inside anywhere and sit
down. Let me wait."
Mrs. Munsberg read the Sunday papers and revered them. She also knew
the value of advertisement. She caught her husband's eye and
hurriedly winked at him.
"It's awful outside. 'T won't do harm if he waits--if he ain't no
agent," she put in.
"See," said Tembarom, handing over one of the cards which had been
Little Ann's businesslike inspiration.
"T. Tembarom. New York Sunday Earth," read Munsberg, rather
grudgingly. He looked at T. Tembarom, and T. Tembarom looked back at
him. The normal human friendliness in the sharp boyish face did it.
"Vell," he said, making another jerk toward a chair, "if you ain't no
agent, you can vait."
"Thank you," said Tembarom, and sat down. He had made another start,
anyhow.
After this the packing went on fast and furious. A youth appeared
from the back of the store, and ran here and there as he was ordered.
Munsberg and his wife filled wooden and cardboard boxes with small
cakes and larger ones, with sandwiches and salads, candies and
crystallized fruits. Into the larger box was placed a huge cake with
an icing temple on the top of it, with silver doves adorning it
outside and in. There was no mistaking the poetic significance of
that cake. Outside the blizzard whirled clouds of snow-particles
through the air, and the van horse kept his head down and his
forelegs braced. His driver had long since tried to cover him with a
blanket which the wind continually tore loose from its fastenings,
and flapped about the creature's sides. Inside the store grew hot.
There was hurried moving about, banging of doors, excited voices,
irascible orders given and countermanded. Tembarom found out in five
minutes that the refreshments were for a wedding reception to be held
at a place known as "The Hall," and the goods must be sent out in
time to be ready for the preparations for the wedding supper that
night.
"If I knew how to handle it, I could get stuff for a column just
sitting here," he thought. He kept both eyes and ears open. He was
sharp enough to realize that the mere sense of familiarity with
detail which he was gaining was material in itself. Once or twice he
got up and lent a hand with a box in his casual way, and once or
twice he saw that he could lift some-thing down or up for Mrs.
Munsberg, who was a little woman. The natural casualness of his way
of jumping up to do the things prevented any suspicion of
officiousness, and also prevented his waiting figure from beginning
to wear the air of a superfluous object in the way. He waited a long
time, and circumstances so favored him as to give him a chance or so.
More than once exactly the right moment presented itself when he
could interject an apposite remark. Twice he made Munsberg laugh, and
twice Mrs. Munsberg voluntarily addressed him.
At last the boxes and parcels ware all carried out and stored in the
van, after strugglings with the opening and shutting of doors, and
battlings with outside weather.
When this was all over, Munsberg came back into the store, knocking
his hands together and out of breath.
"Dot's all right," he said. " It'll all be there plenty time.
Vouldn't have fell down on that order for tventy-vive dollars. Dot
temple on the cake was splendid. Joseph he done it fine."
"He never done nothin' no finer," Mrs. Munsberg said. "It looked as
good as anything on Fift' Avenoo."
Both were relieved and pleased with themselves, their store, and
their cake-decorator. Munsberg spoke to Tembarom in the manner of a
man who, having done a good thing, does not mind talking about it.
"Dot was a big order," he remarked.
"I should smile," answered Tembarom. "I'd like to know whose going to
get outside all that good stuff. That wedding-cake took the tart away
from anything I've ever seen. Which of the four hundred's going to
eat it?"
"De man vot ordered dot cake," Munsberg swaggered, "he's not got to
vorry along on vun million nor two. He owns de biggest brewery in New
York, I guess in America. He's Schwartz of Schwartz & Kapfer."
"Well, he 's got it to burn!" said Tembarom.
"He's a mighty good man," went on Munsberg. " He's mighty fond of his
own people. He made his first money in Harlem, and he had a big fight
to get it; but his own people vas good to him, an' he's never forgot
it. He's built a fine house here, an' his girls is fine girls. De
vun's goin' to be married to-night her name's Rachel, an' she's goin'
to marry a nice feller, Louis Levy. Levy built the big entertainment-
hall vhere the reception's goin' to be. It's decorated vith two
thousand dollars' worth of bride roses an' lilies of de valley an'
smilax. All de up-town places vas bought out, an' den Schwartz vent
down Fift' Avenoo."
The right moment had plainly arrived.
"Say, Mr. Munsberg," Tembarom broke forth, "you're giving me just
what I wanted to ask you for. I'm the new up-town society reporter
for the Sunday Earth, and I came in here to see if you wouldn't help
me to get a show at finding out who was going to have weddings and
society doings. I didn't know just how to start."
Munsberg gave a sort of grunt. He looked less amiable.
"I s'pose you're used to nothin' but Fift' Avenoo," he said.
Tembarom grinned exactly at the right time again. Not only his good
teeth grinned, but his eyes grinned also, if the figure may be used.
"Fifth Avenue!" he laughed. "There's been no Fifth Avenue in mine.
I'm not used to anything, but you may bet your life I'm going to get
used to Harlem, if you people'll let me. I've just got this job, and
I'm dead stuck on it. I want to make it go."
"He's mighty different from Biker," said Mrs. Munsberg in an
undertone.
"Vhere's dod oder feller?" inquired Munsberg. "He vas a dam fool, dot
oder feller, half corned most de time, an' puttin' on Clarence airs.
No one was goin' to give him nothin'. He made folks mad at de start."
"I've got his job," said Tembarom, "and if I can't make it go, the
page will be given up. It'll be my fault if that happens, not
Harlem's. There's society enough up-town to make a first-class page,
and I shall be sick if I can't get on to it."
He had begun to know his people. Munsberg was a good- natured,
swaggering little Hebrew.
That the young fellow should make a clean breast of it and claim no
down-town superiority, and that he should also have the business
insight to realize that he might obtain valuable society items from
such a representative confectioner as M. Munsberg, was a situation to
incite amiable sentiments.
"Vell, you didn't come to de wrong place," he said. "All de biggest
things comes to me, an' I don't mind tellin' you about 'em. 'T ain't
goin' to do no harm. Weddings an' things dey ought to be wrote up,
anyhow, if dey're done right. It's good for business. Vy don't dey
have no pictures of de supper- tables? Dot'd be good."
"There's lots of receptions and weddings this month," said Mrs.
Munsberg, becoming agreeably excited. "And there's plenty handsome
young girls that'd like their pictures published.
"None of them have been in Sunday papers before, and they'd like it.
The four Schwartz girls would make grand pictures. They dress
splendid, and their bridesmaids dresses came from the biggest place
in Fift' Avenoo."
"Say," exclaimed Tembarom, rising from his chair, "I'm in luck. Luck
struck me the minute I turned in here. If you'll tell me where
Schwartz lives, and where the hall is, and the church, and just
anything else I can use, I'll go out and whoop up a page to beat the
band." He was glowing with exultation. "I know I can do it. You've
started me off."
Munsberg and his wife began to warm. It was almost as though they had
charge of the society page themselves. There was something
stimulating in the idea. There was a suggestion of social importance
in it. They knew a number of people who would be pleased with the
prospect of being in the Sunday Earth. They were of a race which
holds together, and they gave not only the names and addresses of
prospective entertainers, but those of florists and owners of halls
where parties were given.
Mrs. Munsberg gave the name of a dressmaker of whom she shrewdly
guessed that she would be amiably ready to talk to a society-page
reporter.
"That Biker feller," she said, "got things down all wrong. He called
fine white satin 'white nun's-veiling,' and he left out things. Never
said nothing about Miss Lewishon's diamond ring what her grandpa gave
her for a wedding-present. An' it cost two hundred and fifty."
"Well, I'm a pretty big fool myself," said Tembarom, "but I should
have known better than that."
When he opened the door to go, Mrs. Munsberg called after him:
"When you get through, you come back here and tell us what you done.
I'll give you a cup of hot coffee."
He returned to Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house so late that night that
even Steinberger and Bowles had ended their day. The gas in the hall
was turned down to a glimmering point, and the house was silent for
the night. Even a cat who stole to him and rubbed herself against his
leg miauwed in a sort of abortive whisper, opening her mouth wide,
but emitting no sound. When he went cautiously up the staircase he
carried his damp overcoat with him, and hung it in company with the
tartan muffler close to the heater in the upper hall. Then he laid on
his bedside table a package of papers and photographs.
After he had undressed, he dropped heavily into bed, exhausted, but
elate.
"I'm dog-tired," he said, "but I guess I've got it going." And
almost before the last word had uttered itself he fell into the deep
sleep of worn-out youth.
CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house began to be even better pleased with him
than before. He had stories to tell, festivities to describe, and
cheerful incidents to recount. The boarders assisted vicariously at
weddings and wedding receptions, afternoon teas and dances, given in
halls. "Up-town" seemed to them largely given to entertainment and
hilarity of an enviably prodigal sort. Mrs. Bowse's guests were not
of the class which entertains or is entertained, and the details of
banquets and ball-dresses and money-spending were not uncheering
material for conversation. Such topics suggested the presence and
dispensing of a good deal of desirable specie, which in floating
about might somehow reach those who needed it most. The impression
was that T. Tembarom was having "a good time." It was not his way to
relate any incidents which were not of a cheering or laughter-
inspiring nature. He said nothing of the times when his luck was bad,
when he made blunders, and, approaching the wrong people, was met
roughly or grudgingly, and found no resource left but to beat a
retreat. He made no mention of his experiences in the blizzard, which
continued, and at times nearly beat breath and life out of him as he
fought his way through it. Especially he told no story of the morning
when, after having labored furiously over the writing of his "stuff"
until long after midnight, he had taken it to Galton, and seen his
face fall as he looked over it. To battle all day with a blizzard and
occasional brutal discouragements, and to sit up half the night
tensely absorbed in concentrating one's whole mental equipment upon
the doing of unaccustomed work has its effect. As he waited, Tembarom
unconsciously shifted from one foot to another, and had actually to
swallow a sort of lump in his throat.
"I guess it won't do," he said rather uncertainly as Galton laid a
sheet down.
Galton was worn out himself and harried by his nerves.
"No, it won't," he said; and then as he saw Tembarom move to the
other foot he added, "Not as it is."
Tembarom braced himself and cleared his throat.
"If," he ventured--" well, you've been mighty easy on me, Mr Galton--
and this is a big chance for a fellow like me. If it's too big a
chance--why--that's all. But if it's anything I could change and it
wouldn't be too much trouble to tell me--"
"There's no time to rewrite it," answered Galton. "It must be handed
in to-morrow. It's too flowery. Too many adjectives. I've no time to
give you--" He snatched up a blue pencil and began to slash at the
paper with it. "Look here-- and here--cut out that balderdash--cut
this--and this-- oh,--" throwing the pencil down,--"you'd have to cut
it all out. There's no time." He fell back in his chair with a
hopeless movement, and rubbed his forehead nervously with the back of
his hand. Ten people more or less were waiting to speak to him; he
was worn out with the rush of work. He believed in the page, and did
not want to give up his idea; but he didn't know a man to hand it to
other than this untrained, eager ignoramus whom he had a queer
personal liking for. He was no business of his, a mere stenographer
in his office with whom he could be expected to have no relations,
and yet a curious sort of friendliness verging on intimacy had
developed between them.
"There'd be time if you thought it wouldn't do any harm to give me
another chance," said Tembarom. "I can sit up all night. I guess I've
caught on to what you DON'T want. I've put in too many fool words. I
got them out of other papers, but I don't know how to use them. I
guess I've caught on. Would it do any harm if you gave me till to-
morrow?"
"No, it wouldn't," said Galton, desperately. "If you can't do it,
there's no time to find another man, and the page must be cut out.
It's been no good so far. It won't be missed. Take it along."
As he pushed back the papers, he saw the photographs, and picked one
up.
"That bride's a good-looking girl. Who are these others? Bridesmaids?
You've got a lot of stuff here. Biker couldn't get anything." He
glanced up at the young fellow's rather pale face. "I thought you'd
make friends. How did you get all this?"
"I beat the streets till I found it," said Tembarom. "I had luck
right away. I went into a confectionery store where they make wedding-
cakes. A good-natured little Dutchman and his wife kept it, and I
talked to them--"
"Got next?" said Galton, grinning a little.
"They gave me addresses, and told me a whole lot of things. I got
into the Schwartz wedding reception, and they treated me mighty well.
A good many of them were willing to talk. I told them what a big
thing the page was going to be, and I--well, I said the more they
helped me the finer it would turn out. I said it seemed a shame there
shouldn't be an up-town page when such swell entertainments were
given. I've got a lot of stuff there."
Galton laughed.
"You'd get it," he said. "If you knew how to handle it, you'd make it
a hit. Well, take it along. If it isn't right tomorrow, it's done
for."
Tembarom didn't tell stories or laugh at dinner that evening. He said
he had a headache. After dinner he bolted upstairs after Little Ann,
and caught her before she mounted to her upper floor.
"Will you come and save my life again?" he said. "I'm in the tightest
place I ever was in in my life."
"I'll do anything I can, Mr. Tembarom," she answered, and as his face
had grown flushed by this time she looked anxious. "You look
downright feverish."
"I've got chills as well as fever," he said. "It's the page. It seems
like I was going to fall down on it."
She turned back at once.
"No you won't, Mr. Tembarom," she said "I'm just right-down sure you
won't."
They went down to the parlor again, and though there were people in
it, they found a corner apart, and in less than ten minutes he had
told her what had happened.
She took the manuscript he handed to her.
"If I was well educated, I should know how to help you," she said,
"but I've only been to a common Manchester school. I don't know
anything about elegant language. What are these?" pointing to the
blue-pencil marks.
Tembarom explained, and she studied the blue slashes with serious
attention.
"Well," she said in a few minutes, laying the manuscript down, "I
should have cut those words out myself if--if you'd asked me which to
take away. They're too showy, Mr. Tembarom."
Tembarom whipped a pencil out of his pocket and held it out.
"Say," he put it to her, "would you take this and draw it through a
few of the other showy ones?"
"I should feel as if I was taking too much upon myself," she said. "I
don't know anything about it."
"You know a darned sight more than I do," Tembarom argued. "I didn't
know they were showy. I thought they were the kind you had to put in
newspaper stuff."
She held the sheets of paper on her knee, and bent her head over them.
Tembarom watched her dimples flash in and out as she worked away
like a child correcting an exercise. Presently he saw she was quite
absorbed. Sometimes she stopped and thought, pressing her lips
together; sometimes she changed a letter. There was no lightness in
her manner. A badly mutilated stocking would have claimed her
attention in the same way.
"I think I'd put 'house' there instead of 'mansion' if I were you,"
she suggested once.
"Put in a whole block of houses if you like," he answered gratefully.
"Whatever you say goes. I believe Galton would say the same thing."
She went over sheet after sheet, and though she knew nothing about it,
she cut out just what Galton would have cut out. She put the papers
together at last and gave them back to Tembarom, getting up from her
seat.
"I must go back to father now," she said. "I promised to make him a
good cup of coffee over the little oil-stove. If you'll come and
knock at the door I'll give you one. It will help you to keep fresh
while you work."
Tembarom did not go to bed at all that night, and he looked rather
fagged the next morning when he handed back the "stuff" entirely
rewritten. He swallowed several times quite hard as he waited for the
final verdict.
"You did catch on to what I didn't want," Galton said at last. "You
will catch on still more as you get used to the work. And you did get
the 'stuff,'"
"That--you mean--that goes?" Tembarom stammered.
"Yes, it goes," answered Galton. "You can turn it in. We'll try the
page for a month."
"Gee! Thank the Lord!" said Tembarom, and then he laughed an excited
boyish laugh, and the blood came back to his face. He had a whole
month before him, and if he had caught on as soon as this, a month
would teach him a lot.
He'd work like a dog.
He worked like a healthy young man impelled by a huge enthusiasm, and
seeing ahead of him something he had had no practical reason for
aspiring to. He went out in all weathers and stayed out to all hours.
Whatsoever rebuffs or difficulties he met with he never was even on
the verge of losing his nerve. He actually enjoyed himself
tremendously at times. He made friends; people began to like to see
him. The Munsbergs regarded him as an inspiration of their own.
"He seen my name over de store and come in here first time he vas
sent up dis vay to look for t'ings to write," Mr. Munsberg always
explained. "Ve vas awful busy--time of the Schwartz vedding, an' dere
vas dat blizzard. He owned up he vas new, an' vanted some vun vhat
knew to tell him vhat vas goin' on. 'Course I could do it. Me an' my
vife give him addresses an' a lot of items. He vorked 'em up good.
Dot up-town page is gettin' first-rate. He says he don' know vhat
he'd have done if he hadn't turned up here dot day."
Tembarom, having "caught on" to his fault of style, applied himself
with vigor to elimination. He kept his tame dictionary chained to the
leg of his table--an old kitchen table which Mrs. Bowse scrubbed and
put into his hall bedroom, overcrowding it greatly. He turned to
Little Ann at moments of desperate uncertainty, but he was man enough
to do his work himself. In glorious moments when he was rather sure
that Galton was far from unsatisfied with his progress, and Ann had
looked more than usually distracting in her aloof and sober
alluringness,-- it was her entire aloofness which so stirred his
blood,--he sometimes stopped scribbling and lost his head for a
minute or so, wondering if a fellow ever COULD "get away with it" to
the extent of making enough to--but he always pulled himself up in
time.
"Nice fool I look, thinking that way!" he would say to himself.
"She'd throw me down hard if she knew. But, my Lord! ain't she just a
peach!"
It was in the last week of the month of trial which was to decide the
permanency of the page that he came upon the man Mrs. Bowse's
boarders called his "Freak." He never called him a "freak" himself
even at the first. Even his somewhat undeveloped mind felt itself
confronted at the outset with something too abnormal and serious,
something with a suggestion of the weird and tragic in it.
In this wise it came about:
The week had begun with another blizzard, which after the second day
had suddenly changed its mind, and turned into sleet and rain which
filled the streets with melted snow, and made walking a fearsome
thing. Tembarom had plenty of walking to do. This week's page was his
great effort, and was to be a "dandy." Galton must be shown what
pertinacity could do.
"I'm going to get into it up to my neck, and then strike out," he
said at breakfast on Monday morning.
Thursday was his most strenuous day. The weather had decided to
change again, and gusts of sleet were being driven about, which added
cold to sloppiness. He had found it difficult to get hold of some
details he specially wanted. Two important and extremely good-looking
brides had refused to see him because Biker had enraged them in his
day. He had slighted the description of their dresses at a dance
where they had been the observed of all observers, and had worn
things brought from Paris. Tembarom had gone from house to house. He
had even searched out aunts whose favor he had won professionally. He
had appealed to his dressmaker, whose affection he had by that time
fully gained. She was doing work in the brides' houses, and could
make it clear that he would not call peau de cygne "Surah silk," nor
duchess lace "Baby Irish." But the young ladies enjoyed being
besought by a society page. It was something to discuss with one's
bridesmaids and friends, to protest that "those interviewers" give a
person no peace. "If you don't want to be in the papers, they'll put
you in whether you like it or not, however often you refuse them."
They kept Tembarom running about, they raised faint hopes, and then
went out when he called, leaving no messages, but allowing the
servant to hint that if he went up to Two Hundred and Seventy-fifth
Street he might chance to find them.
"All right," said Tembarom to the girl, delighting her by lifting his
hat genially as he turned to go down the steps. "I'll just keep going.
The Sunday Earth can't come out without those photographs in it. I
should lose my job."
When at last he ran the brides to cover it was not at Two Hundred and
Seventy-fifth Street, but in their own home, to which they had
finally returned. They had heard from the servant-girl about what the
young gentleman from the Sunday Earth had said, and they were
mollified by his proper appreciation of values. Tembarom's dressmaker
friend also proffered information.
"I know him myself," she said, "and he's a real nice gentle-manlike
young man. He's not a bit like Biker. He doesn't think he knows
everything. He came to me from Mrs. Munsberg, just to ask me the
names of fashionable materials. He said it was more important than a
man knew till he found out" Miss Stuntz chuckled.
"He asked me to lend him some bits of samples so he could learn them
off by heart, and know them when he saw them. He's got a pleasant
laugh; shows his teeth, and they're real pretty and white; and he
just laughed like a boy and said: 'These samples are my alphabet,
Miss Stuntz. I'm going to learn to read words of three syllables in
them.'"
When late in the evening Tembarom, being let out of the house after
his interview, turned down the steps again, he carried with him all
he had wanted--information and photographs, even added picturesque
details. He was prepared to hand in a fuller and better page than he
had ever handed in before. He was in as elated a frame of mind as a
young man can be when he is used up with tramping the streets, and
running after street-cars, to stand up in them and hang by a strap.
He had been wearing a new pair of boots, one of which rubbed his heel
and had ended by raising a blister worthy of attention. To reach the
nearest "L" station he must walk across town, through several
deserted streets in the first stages of being built up, their vacant
lots surrounded by high board fencing covered with huge advertising
posters. The hall bedroom, with the gas turned up and the cheap, red-
cotton comfort on the bed, made an alluring picture as he faced the
sleety wind.
"If I cut across to the avenue and catch the 'L,' I'm bound to get
there sometime, anyhow," he said as he braced himself and set out on
his way.
The blister on his heel had given him a good deal of trouble, and he
was obliged to stop a moment to ease it, and he limped when he began
to walk again. But he limped as fast as he could, while the sleety
rain beat in his face, across one street, down another for a block or
so, across another, the melting snow soaking even the new boots as he
splashed through it. He bent his head, however, and limped steadily.
At this end of the city many of the streets were only scantily built
up, and he was passing through one at the corner of which was a big
vacant lot. At the other corner a row of cheap houses which had only
reached their second story waited among piles of bricks and frozen
mortar for the return of the workmen the blizzard had dispersed. It
was a desolate-enough thoroughfare, and not a soul was in sight. The
vacant lot was fenced in with high boarding plastered over with
flaring sheets advertising whiskies, sauces, and theatrical ventures.
A huge picture of a dramatically interrupted wedding ceremony done in
reds and yellows, and announcing in large letters that Mr. Isaac
Simonson presented Miss Evangeline St. Clair in "Rent Asunder,"
occupied several yards of the boarding. As he reached it, the heel of
Tembarom's boot pressed, as it seemed to him, a red-hot coal on the
flesh. He had rubbed off the blister. He was obliged to stop a moment
again.
"Gee whizz!" he exclaimed through his teeth, "I shall have to take
my boot off and try to fix it."
To accomplish this he leaned against the boarding and Miss Evangeline
St. Clair being "Rent Asunder" in the midst of the wedding service.
He cautiously removed his boot, and finding a hole in his sock in the
place where the blister had rubbed off, he managed to protect the raw
spot by pulling the sock over it. Then he drew on his boot again.
"That'll be better," he said, with a long breath.
As he stood on his feet again he started involuntarily. This was not
because the blister had hurt him, but because he had heard behind him
a startling sound.
"What's that?" broke from him. "What's that?"
He turned and listened, feeling his heart give a quick thump. In the
darkness of the utterly empty street the thing was unnatural enough
to make any man jump. He had heard it between two gusts of wind, and
through another he heard it again - an uncanny, awful sobbing, broken
by a hopeless wail of words.
"I can't remember! I can't- remember! 0 my God !"
And it was not a woman's voice or a child's; it was a man's, and
there was an eerie sort of misery in it which made Tembarom feel
rather sick. He had never heard a man sobbing before. He belonged to
a class which had no time for sobs. This sounded ghastly.
"Good Lord!" he said, "the fellow's crying! A man!"
The sound came directly behind him. There was not a human being in
sight. Even policemen do not loiter in empty streets.
"Hello!" he cried. "Where are you?"
But the low, horrible sound went on, and no answer came. His physical
sense of the presence of the blister was blotted out by the abnormal
thrill of the moment. One had to find out about a thing like that-
one just had to. One could not go on and leave it behind
uninvestigated in the dark and emptiness of a street no one was
likely to pass through. He listened more intently. Yes, it was just
behind him.
"He's in the lot behind the fence," he said. "How did he get there?"
He began to walk along the boarding to find a gap. A few yards
farther on he came upon a broken place in the inclosure - a place
where boards had sagged until they fell down, or had perhaps been
pulled down by boys who wanted to get inside. He went through it, and
found lie was in the usual vacant lot long given up to rubbish. When
he stood still a moment he heard the sobbing again, and followed the
sound to the place behind the boarding against which he had supported
himself when he took off his boot.
A man was lying on the ground with his arms flung out. The street
lamp outside the boarding cast light enough to reveal him. Tembarom
felt as though he had suddenly found himself taking part in a
melodrama,-" The Streets of New York," for choice,-though no
melodrama had ever given him this slightly shaky feeling. But when a
fellow looked up against it as hard as this, what you had to do was
to hold your nerve and make him feel he was going to be helped. The
normal human thing spoke loud in him.
"Hello, old man!" he said with cheerful awkwardness. "What's hit you?"
The man started and scrambled to his feet as though he were
frightened. He was wet, unshaven, white and shuddering, piteous to
look at. He stared with wild eyes, his chest heaving.
"What's up?" said Tembarom.
The man's breath caught itself.
"I don't remember." There was a touch of horror in his voice, though
he was evidently making an effort to control him-self. "I can't - I
can't remember." "What's your name? You remember that?" Tembarom put
it to him.
"N-n-no !" agonizingly. "If I could! If I could!"
"How did you get in here?"
"I came in because I saw a policeman. He wouldn't understand. He
would have stopped me. I must not be stopped. I MUST not."
"Where were you going? " asked Tembarom, not knowing what else to say.
"Home! My God! man, home!" and he fell to shuddering again. He put
his arm against the boarding and dropped his head against it. The low,
hideous sobbing tore him again.
T. Tembarom could not stand it. In his newsboy days he had never been
able to stand starved dogs and homeless cats. Mrs. Bowse was taking
care of a wretched dog for him at the present moment. He had not
wanted the poor brute,--he was not particularly fond of dogs,-- but
it had followed him home, and after he had given it a bone or so, it
had licked its chops and turned up its eyes at him with such abject
appeal that he had not been able to turn it into the streets again.
He was unsentimental, but ruled by primitive emotions. Also he had a
sudden recollection of a night when as a little fellow he had gone
into a vacant lot and cried as like this as a child could. It was a
bad night when some "tough" big boys had turned him out of a warm
corner in a shed, and he had had nowhere to go, and being a friendly
little fellow, the unfriendliness had hit him hard. The boys had not
seen him crying, but he remembered it. He drew near, and put his hand
on the shaking shoulder.
"Say, don't do that," he said. "I'll help you to remember."
He scarcely knew why he said it. There was something in the situation
and in the man himself which was compelling. He was not of the tramp
order. His wet clothes had been decent, and his broken, terrified
voice was neither coarse nor nasal. He lifted his head and caught
Tembarom's arm, clutching it with desperate fingers.
"Could you?" he poured forth the words. "Could you? I'm not quite mad.
Something happened. If I could be quiet! Don't let them stop me! My
God! my God! my God! I can't say it. It's not far away, but it won't
come back. You're a good fellow; if you're human, help me! help me!
help me!" He clung to Tembarom with hands which shook; his eyes were
more abject than the starved dog's; he choked, and awful tears rolled
down his cheeks. "Only help me," he cried--"just help, help, help--
for a while. Perhaps not long. It would come back." He made a
horrible effort. "Listen! My name--I am--I am--it's--"
He was down on the ground again, groveling. His efforts had failed.
Tembarom, overwrought himself, caught at him and dragged him up.
"Make a fight," he said. "You can't lie down like that. You've got to
put up a fight. It'll come back. I tell you it will. You've had a
clip on the head or something. Let me call an ambulance and take you
to the hospital."
The next moment he was sorry he had said the words, the man's terror
was so ill to behold. He grew livid with it, and uttered a low animal
cry.
"Don't drop dead over it," said Tembarom, rather losing his head. "I
won't do it, though what in thunder I'm going to do with you I don't
know. You can't stay here."
"For God's sake!" said the man. "For God's sake!" He put his shaking
hand on Tembarom again, and looked at him with a bewildered scrutiny.
"I'm not afraid of you," he said; "I don't know why. There's
something all right about you. If you'll stand by me--you'd stand by
a man, I'd swear. Take me somewhere quiet. Let me get warm and think."
"The less you think now the better," answered Tembarom. "You want a
bed and a bath and a night's rest. I guess I've let myself in for it.
You brush off and brace yourself and come with me."
There was the hall bedroom and the red-cotton comfort for one night
at least, and Mrs. Bowse was a soft-hearted woman. If she'd heard the
fellow sobbing behind the fence, she'd have been in a worse fix than
he was. Women were kinder-hearted than men, anyhow. The way the
fellow's voice sounded when he said, "Help me, help me, help me!"
sounded as though he was in hell. "Made me feel as if I was bracing
up a chap that was going to be electrocuted," he thought, feeling
sickish again. "I've not got backbone enough to face that sort of
thing. Got to take him somewhere."
They were walking toward the "L" together, and he was wondering what
he should say to Mrs. Bowse when he saw his companion fumbling under
his coat at the back as though he was in search of something. His
hands being unsteady, it took him some moments to get at what he
wanted. He evidently had a belt or a hidden pocket. He got something
out and stopped under a street light to show it to Tembarom. His
hands still shook when he held them out, and his look was a curious,
puzzled, questioning one. What he passed over to Tembarom was a roll
of money. Tembarom rather lost his breath as he saw the number on two
five-hundred-dollar bills, and of several hundreds, besides twenties,
tens, and fives.
"Take it--keep it," he said. "It will pay."
"Hully gee!" cried Tembarom, aghast. "Don't go giving away your whole
pile to the first fellow you meet. I don't want it."
"Take it." The stranger put his hand on his shoulder, the abject look
in his eyes harrowingly like the starved dog's again.
"There's something all right about you. You'll help me."
"If I don't take it for you, some one will knock you upon the head
for it." Tembarom hesitated, but the next instant he stuffed it all
in his pocket, incited thereto by the sound of a whizzing roar.
"There's the 'L' coming," he cried; "run for all you're worth." And
they fled up the street and up the steps, and caught it without a
second to spare.
CHAPTER V
At about the time Tembarom made his rush to catch the "L" Joseph
Hutchinson was passing through one of his periodical fits of
infuriated discouragement. Little Ann knew they would occur every two
or three days, and she did not wonder at them. Also she knew that if
she merely sat still and listened as she sewed, she would be doing
exactly what her mother would have done and what her father would find
a sort of irritated comfort in. There was no use in citing people's
villainies and calling them names unless you had an audience who would
seem to agree to the justice of your accusations.
So Mr. Hutchinson charged up and down the room, his face red, and his
hands thrust in his coat pockets. He was giving his opinions of
America and Americans, and he spoke with his broadest Manchester
accent, and threw in now and then a word or so of Lancashire dialect
to add roughness and strength, the angrier a Manchester man being, the
broader and therefore the more forcible his accent. "Tha" is somehow a
great deal more bitter or humorous or affectionate than the mere
ordinary "You" or "Yours."
"'Merica," he bellowed - "dang 'Merica! I says - an' dang 'Mericans.
Goin' about th' world braggin' an' boastin' about their sharpness an'
their open-'andedness. 'Go to 'Merica,' folks'll tell you, 'with an
invention, and there's dozens of millionaires ready to put money in
it.' Fools!"
"Now, Father," - Little Ann's voice was as maternal as her mother's
had been, - "now, Father, love, don't work yourself up into a passion.
You know it's not good for you." "I don't need to work myself up into
one. I'm in one. A man sells everything he owns to get to 'Merica, an'
when he gets there what does he find? He canna' get near a
millionaire. He's pushed here an scuffled there, an' told this chap
can't see him, an' that chap isn't interested, an' he must wait his
chance to catch this one. An' he waits an' waits, an' goes up in
elevators an' stands on one leg in lobbies, till he's broke' down an'
sick of it, an' has to go home to England steerage."
Little Ann looked up from her sewing. He had been walking furiously
for half an hour, and had been tired to begin with. She had heard his
voice break roughly as he said the last words. He threw himself
astride a chair and, crossing his arms on the back of it, dropped his
head on them. Her mother never allowed this. Her idea was that women
were made to tide over such moments for the weaker sex. Far had it
been from the mind of Mrs. Hutchinson to call it weaker. "But there's
times, Ann, when just for a bit they're just like children. They need
comforting without being let to know they are being comforted. You
know how it is when your back aches, and some one just slips a pillow
under it in the right place without saying anything. That's what women
can do if they've got heads. It needs a head."
Little Ann got up and went to the chair. She began to run her fingers
caressingly through the thick, grizzled hair.
"There, Father, love, there!" she said. "We are going back to England,
at any rate, aren't we? And grandmother will be so glad to have us
with her in her cottage. And America's only one place."
"I tried it first, dang it!" jerked out Hutchinson. "Every one told me
to do it." He quoted again with derisive scorn: "'You go to 'Merica.
'Merica's the place for a chap like you. 'Merica's the place for
inventions.' Liars!"
Little Ann went on rubbing the grizzled head lovingly.
"Well, now we're going back to try England. You never did really try
England. And you know how beautiful it'll be in the country, with the
primroses in bloom and the young lambs in the fields." The caressing
hand grew even softer. "And you're not going to forget how mother
believed in the invention; you can't do that."
Hutchinson lifted his head and looked at her.
"Eh, Ann," he said, "you are a comfortable little body. You've got a
way with you just like your poor mother had. You always say the right
thing to help a chap pull himself together. Your mother did believe in
it, didn't she?"
She had, indeed, believed in it, though her faith was founded more
upon confidence in "Mr. Hutchinson" than in any profound knowledge of
the mechanical appliance his inspiration would supply. She knew it had
something important to do with locomotive engines, and she knew that
if railroad magnates would condescend to consider it, her husband was
sure that fortune would flow in. She had lived with the "invention,"
as it was respectfully called, for years.
"That she did," answered Little Ann. "And before she died she said to
me: 'Little Ann,' she said, 'there's one thing you must never let your
father do. You must never let him begin not to believe in his
invention. Your father's a clever man, and it's a clever invention,
and it'll make his fortune yet. You must remind him how I believed in
it and how sure I was.'"
Hutchinson rubbed his hands thoughtfully. He had heard this before,
but it did him good to hear it again.
"She said that, did she?" he found vague comfort in saying. "She said
that?"
"Yes, she did, Father. It was the very day before she died."
"Well, she never said anything she hadn't thought out," he said in
slow retrospection. "And she had a good head of her own. Eh, she was a
wonderful woman, she was, for sticking to things. That was th'
Lancashire in her. Lancashire folks knows their own minds."
"Mother knew hers," said Ann. "And she always said you knew yours.
Come and sit in your own chair, Father, and have your paper."
She had tided him past the worst currents without letting him slip
into them.
"I like folks that knows their own minds," he said as he sat down and
took his paper from her. "You know yours, Ann; and there's that
Tembarom chap. He knows his. I've been noticing that chap." There was
a certain pleasure in using a tone of amiable patronage. "He's got a
way with him that's worth money to him in business, if he only knew
it."
"I don't think he knows he's got a way," Little Ann said. "His way is
just him."
"He just gets over people with it, like he got over me. I was ready to
knock his head off first time he spoke to me. I was ready to knock
anybody's head off that day. I'd just had that letter from Hadman. He
made me sick wi' the way he pottered an' played the fool about the
invention. He believed in it right enough, but he hadn't the courage
of a mouse. He wasn't goin' to be the first one to risk his money.
Him, with all he has! He's the very chap to be able to set it goin'.
If I could have got some one else to put up brass, it'd have started
him. It's want o' backbone, that's the matter wi' Hadman an' his lot."
"Some of these days some of them 're going to get their eyes open,"
said Little Ann, "and then the others will be sorry. Mr. Tembarom says
they'll fall over themselves to get in on the ground floor."
Hutchinson chuckled.
"That's New York," he said. "He's a rum chap. But he thinks a good bit
of the invention. I've talked it over with him, because I've wanted to
talk, and the one thing I've noticed about Tembarom is that he can
keep his mouth shut."
"But he talks a good deal," said Ann.
"That's the best of it. You'd think he was telling all he knows, and
he's not by a fat lot. He tells you what you'll like to hear, and he's
not sly; but he can keep a shut mouth. That's Lancashire. Some folks
can't do it even when they want to."
"His father came from England."
"That's where the lad's sense comes from. Perhaps he's Lancashire. He
had a lot of good ideas about the way to get at Hadman."
A knock at the door broke in upon them. Mrs. Bowse presented herself,
wearing a novel expression on her face. It was at once puzzled and not
altogether disagreeably excited.
"I wish you would come down into the dining-room, Little Ann." She
hesitated. " Mr. Tembaron's brought home such a queer man. He picked
him up ill in the street. He wants me to let him stay with him for the
night, anyhow. I don't think he's crazy, but I guess he's lost his
memory. Queerest thing I ever saw. He doesn't know his name or
anything."
"See here," broke out Hutchinson, dropping his hands and his paper on
his knee, "I'm not going to have Ann goin' down stairs to quiet
lunatics."
"He's as quiet as a child," Mrs. Bowse protested. "There's something
pitiful about him, he seems so frightened. He's drenched to the skin."
"Call an ambulance and send him to the hospital," advised Hutchinson.
"That's what Mr. Tembarom says he can't do. It frightens him to death
to speak of it. He just clings to Mr. Tembarom sort of awful, as if he
thinks he'll save his life. But that isn't all," she added in an
amazed tone; "he's given Mr. Tembarom more than two thousand dollars."
"What!" shouted Hutchinson, bounding to his feet quite unconsciously.
"What!" exclaimed Little Ann.
"Just you come and look at it," answered Mrs. Bowse, nodding her head.
"There's over two thousand dollars in bills spread out on the table in
the dining-room this minute. He had it in a belt pocket, and he
dragged it out in the street and would make Mr. Tembarom take it. Do
come and tell us what to do."
"I'd get him to take off his wet clothes and get into bed, and drink
some hot spirits and water first," said Little Ann. "Wouldn't you,
Mrs. Bowse?"
Hutchinson got up, newspaper in hand.
"I say, I'd like to go down and have a look at that chap myself," he
announced.
"If he's so frightened, perhaps--" Little Ann hesitated.
"That's it," put in Mrs. Bowse. "He's so nervous it'd make him worse
to see another man. You'd better wait, Mr. Hutchinson."
Hutchinson sat down rather grumpily, and Mrs. Bowse and Little Ann
went down the stairs together.
"I feel real nervous myself," said Mrs. Bowse, "it's so queer. But
he's not crazy. He's quiet enough."
As they neared the bottom of the staircase Little Ann could see over
the balustrade into the dining-room. The strange man was sitting by
the table, his disordered, black-haired head on his arm. He looked
like an exhausted thing. Tembarom was sitting by him, and was talking
in an encouraging voice. He had laid a hand on one of the stranger's.
On the table beside them was spread a number of bills which had
evidently just been counted.
"Here's the ladies," said Tembarom.
The stranger lifted his head and, having looked, rose and stood
upright, waiting. It was the involuntary, mechanical action of a man
who had been trained among gentlemen.
"It's Mrs. Bowse again, and she's brought Miss Hutchinson down with
her. Miss Hutchinson always knows what to do," explained Tembarom in
his friendly voice.
The man bowed, and his bewildered eyes fixed themselves on Little Ann.
"Thank you," he said. "It's very kind of you. I--I am-- in great
trouble."
Little Ann went to him and smiled her motherly smile at him.
"You're very wet," she said. "You'll take a bad cold if you're not
careful. Mrs. Bowse thinks you ought to go right to bed and have
something hot to drink."
"It seems a long time since I was in bed," he answered her.
"I'm very tired. Thank you." He drew a weary, sighing breath, but he
didn't move his eyes from the girl's face. Perhaps the cessation of
action in certain cells of his brain had increased action in others.
He looked as though he were seeing something in Little Ann's face
which might not have revealed itself so clearly to the more normal
gaze.
He moved slightly nearer to her. He was a tall man, and had to look
down at her.
"What is your name?" he asked anxiously. "Names trouble me."
It was Ann who drew a little nearer to him now. She had to look up,
and the soft, absorbed kindness in her eyes might, Tembarom thought,
have soothed a raging lion, it was so intent on its purpose.
"My name is Ann Hutchinson; but never you mind about it now," she
said. "I'll tell it to you again. Let Mr. Tembarom take you up-stairs
to bed. You'll be better in the morning." And because his hollow eyes
rested on her so fixedly she put her hand on his wet sleeve.
"You're wet through," she said. "That won't do."
He looked down at her hand and then at her face again.
"Help me," he pleaded, "just help me. I don't know what's happened.
Have I gone mad? "
"No," she answered; "not a bit. It'll all come right after a while;
you'll see."
"Will it, will it?" he begged, and then suddenly his eyes were full of
tears. It was a strange thing to see him in his bewildered misery try
to pull himself together, and bite his shaking lips as though he
vaguely remembered that he was a man. "I beg pardon," he faltered: "I
suppose I'm ill."
"I don't know where to put him," Mrs. Bowse was saying half aside;
"I've not got a room empty."
"Put him in my bed and give me a shake-down on the floor," said
Tembarom. "That'll be all right. He doesn't want me to leave him,
anyhow."
He turned to the money on the table.
"Say," he said to his guest, "there's two thousand five hundred
dollars here. We've counted it to make sure. That's quite some money.
And it's yours--"
The stranger looked disturbed and made a nervous gesture.
"Don't, don't!" he broke in. "Keep it. Some one took the rest. This
was hidden. It will pay."
"You see he isn't real' out of his mind," Mrs. Bowse murmured
feelingly.
"No, not real' out of it," said Tembarom. "Say,"--as an inspiration
occurred to him, --"I guess maybe Miss Hutchinson will keep it. Will
you, Little Ann? You can give it to him when he wants it."
"It's a good bit of money," said Little Ann, soberly; "but I can put
it in a bank and pay Mrs. Bowse his board every week. Yes, I'll take
it. Now he must go to bed. It's a comfortable little room," she said
to the stranger, "and Mrs. Bowse will make you a hot milk-punch.
That'll be nourishing."
"Thank you," murmured the man, still keeping his yearning eyes on her.
"Thank you."
So he was taken up to the fourth floor and put into Tembarom's bed.
The hot milk-punch seemed to take the chill out of him, and when, by
lying on his pillow and gazing at the shakedown on the floor as long
as he could keep his eyes open, he had convinced himself that Tembarom
was going to stay with him, he fell asleep.
Little Ann went back to her father carrying a roll of bills in her
hands. It was a roll of such size that Hutchinson started up in his
chair and stared at the sight of it.
"Is that the money?" he exclaimed. "What are you going to do with it?
What have you found out, lass?"
"Yes, this is it," she answered. "Mr. Tembarom asked me to take care
of it. I'm going to put it in the bank. But we haven't found out
anything."
CHAPTER VI
His was the opening incident of the series of extraordinary and
altogether incongruous events which took place afterwards, as it
appeared to T. Tembarom, like scenes in a play in which he had become
involved in a manner which one might be inclined to regard humorously
and make jokes about, because it was a thousand miles away from
anything like real life. That was the way it struck him. The events
referred to, it was true, were things one now and then read about in
newspapers, but while the world realized that they were actual
occurrences, one rather regarded them, when their parallels were
reproduced in books and plays, as belonging alone to the world of pure
and highly romantic fiction.
"I guess the reason why it seems that way," he summed it up to
Hutchinson and Little Ann, after the worst had come to the worst, "is
because we've not only never known any one it's happened to, but we've
never known any one that's known any one it's happened to. I've got to
own up that it makes me feel as if the fellows'd just yell right out
laughing when they heard it."
The stranger's money had been safely deposited in a bank, and the
stranger himself still occupied Tembarom's bedroom. He slept a great
deal and was very quiet. With great difficulty Little Ann had
persuaded him to let a doctor see him, and the doctor had been much
interested in his case. He had expected to find some signs of his
having received accidentally or otherwise a blow upon the head, but on
examination he found no scar or wound. The condition he was in was
frequently the result of concussion of the brain, sometimes of
prolonged nervous strain or harrowing mental shock. Such cases
occurred not infrequently. Quiet and entire freedom from excitement
would do more for such a condition than anything else. If he was
afraid of strangers, by all means keep them from him. Tembarom had
been quite right in letting him think he would help him to remember,
and that somehow he would in the end reach the place he had evidently
set out to go to. Nothing must be allowed to excite him. It was well
he had had money on his person and that he had fallen into friendly
hands. A city hospital would not have been likely to help him greatly.
The restraint of its necessary discipline might have alarmed him.
So long as he was persuaded that Tembarom was not going to desert him,
he was comparatively calm, though sunk in a piteous and tormented
melancholy. His worst hours were when he sat alone in the hall
bedroom, with his face buried in his hands. He would so sit without
moving or speaking, and Little Ann discovered that at these times he
was trying to remember. Sometimes he would suddenly rise and walk
about the little room, muttering, with woe in his eyes. Ann, who saw
how hard this was for him, found also that to attempt to check or
distract him was even worse. When, sitting in her father's room, which
was on the other side of the wall, she heard his fretted, hurried
pacing feet, her face lost its dimpled cheerfulness. She wondered if
her mother would not have discovered some way of clearing the black
cloud distracting his brain. Nothing would induce him to go down to
the boarders' dining-room for his meals, and the sight of a servant
alarmed him so that it was Ann who took him the scant food he would
eat. As the time of her return to England with her father drew near,
she wondered what Mr. Tembarom would do without her services. It was
she who suggested that they must have a name for him, and the name of
a part of Manchester had provided one. There was a place called
Strangeways, and one night when, in talking to her father, she
referred to it in Tembarom's presence, he suddenly seized upon it.
"Strangeways," he said. "That'd make a good-enough name for him. Let's
call him Mr. Strangeways. I don't like the way the fellows have of
calling him 'the Freak.'"
So the name had been adopted, and soon became an established fact.
"The way I feel about him," Tembarom said, "is that the fellow's not a
bit of a joke. What I see is that he's up against about the toughest
proposition I've ever known. Gee! that fellow's not crazy. He's worse.
If he was out-and-out dippy and didn't know it, he'd be all right.
Likely as not he'd be thinking he was the Pope of Rome or Anna Held.
What knocks him out is that he's just right enough to know he's wrong,
and to be trying to get back. He reminds me of one of those chaps the
papers tell about sometimes--fellows that go to work in livery-stables
for ten years and call themselves Bill Jones, and then wake up some
morning and remember they're some high-browed minister of the gospel
named the Rev. James Cadwallader."
When the curtain drew up on Tembarom's amazing drama, Strangeways had
been occupying his bed nearly three weeks, and he himself had been
sleeping on a cot Mrs. Bowse had put up for him in his room. The
Hutchinsons were on the point of sailing for England--steerage--on the
steamship Transatlantic, and Tembarom was secretly torn into
fragments, though he had done well with the page and he was daring to
believe that at the end of the month Galton would tell him he had
"made good" and the work would continue indefinitely.
If that happened, he would be raised to "twenty-five per" and would be
a man of means. If the Hutchinsons had not been going away, he would
have been floating in clouds of rose color. If he could persuade
Little Ann to take him in hand when she'd had time to "try him out,"
even Hutchinson could not utterly flout a fellow who was making his
steady twenty-five per on a big paper, and was on such terms with his
boss that he might get other chances. Gee! but he was a fellow that
luck just seemed to chase, anyhow! Look at the other chaps, lots of
'em, who knew twice as much as he did, and had lived in decent homes
and gone to school and done their darned best, too, and then hadn't
been able to get there! It didn't seem fair somehow that he should run
into such pure luck.
The day arrived when Galton was to give his decision. Tembarom was
going to hand in his page, and while he was naturally a trifle
nervous, his nervousness would have been a hopeful and not unpleasant
thing but that the Transatlantic sailed in two days, and in the
Hutchinson's rooms Little Ann was packing her small trunk and her
father's bigger one, which held more models and drawings than
clothing. Hutchinson was redder in the face than usual, and indignant
condemnation of America and American millionaires possessed his soul.
Everybody was rather depressed. One boarder after another had wakened
to a realization that, with the passing of Little Ann, Mrs. Bowse's
establishment, even with the parlor, the cozy-corner, and the second-
hand pianola to support it, would be a deserted-seeming thing. Mrs.
Bowse felt the tone of low spirits about the table, and even had a
horrible secret fear that certain of her best boarders might decide to
go elsewhere, merely to change surroundings from which they missed
something. Her eyes were a little red, and she made great efforts to
keep things going.
"I can only keep the place up when I've no empty rooms, "she had said
to Mrs. Peck, "but I'd have boarded her free if her father would have
let her stay. But he wouldn't, and, anyway, she'd no more let him go
off alone than she'd jump off Brooklyn Bridge."
It had been arranged that partly as a farewell banquet and partly to
celebrate Galton's decision about the page, there was to be an oyster
stew that night in Mr. Hutchinson's room, which was distinguished as a
bed-sitting-room. Tembarom had diplomatically suggested it to Mr.
Hutchinson. It was to be Tembarom's oyster supper, and somehow he
managed to convey that it was only a proper and modest tribute to Mr.
Hutchinson himself. First-class oyster stew and pale ale were not so
bad when properly suggested, therefore Mr. Hutchinson consented. Jim
Bowles and Julius Steinberger were to come in to share the feast, and
Mrs. Bowse had promised to prepare.
It was not an inspiring day for Little Ann. New York had seemed a
bewildering and far too noisy place for her when she had come to it
directly from her grandmother's cottage in the English village, where
she had spent her last three months before leaving England. The dark
rooms of the five-storied boarding-house had seemed gloomy enough to
her, and she had found it much more difficult to adjust herself to her
surroundings than she could have been induced to admit to her father.
At first his temper and the open contempt for American habits and
institutions which he called "speaking his mind" had given her a great
deal of careful steering through shoals to do. At the outset the
boarders had resented him, and sometimes had snapped back their own
views of England and courts. Violent and disparaging argument had
occasionally been imminent, and Mrs. Bowse had worn an ominous look.
Their rooms had in fact been "wanted" before their first week had come
to an end, and Little Ann herself scarcely knew how she had tided over
that situation. But tide it over she did, and by supernatural effort
and watchfulness she contrived to soothe Mrs. Bowse until she had been
in the house long enough to make friends with people and aid her
father to realize that, if they went elsewhere, they might find only
the same class of boarders, and there would be the cost of moving to
consider. She had beguiled an armchair from Mrs. Bowse, and had re-
covered it herself with a remnant of crimson stuff secured from a
miscellaneous heap at a marked-down sale at a department store. She
had arranged his books and papers adroitly and had kept them in their
places so that he never felt himself obliged to search for any one of
them. With many little contrivances she had given his bed-sitting-room
a look of comfort and established homeliness, and he had even begun to
like it.
"Tha't just like tha mother, Ann," he had said. "She'd make a railway
station look as if it had been lived in."
Then Tembarom had appeared, heralded by Mrs. Bowse and the G.
Destroyer, and the first time their eyes had met across the table she
had liked him. The liking had increased. There was that in his boyish
cheer and his not-too-well-fed-looking face which called forth
maternal interest. As she gradually learned what his life had been,
she felt a thrilled anxiety to hear day by day how he was getting on.
She listened for details, and felt it necessary to gather herself
together in the face of a slight depression when hopes of Galton were
less high than usual. His mending was mysteriously done, and in time
he knew with amazed gratitude that he was being "looked after." His
first thanks were so awkward, but so full of appreciation of
unaccustomed luxury, that they almost brought tears to her eyes, since
they so clearly illuminated the entire novelty of any attention
whatever.
"I just don't know what to say," he said, shuffling from one foot to
another, though his nice grin was at its best. "I've never had a woman
do anything for me since I was ten. I guess women do lots of things
for most fellows; but, then, they're mothers and sisters and aunts. I
appreciate it like--like thunder. I feel as if I was Rockefeller, Miss
Ann."
In a short time she had become "Little Ann" to him, as to the rest,
and they began to know each other very well. Jim Bowles and Julius
Steinberger had not been able to restrain themselves at first from
making slangy, yearning love to her, but Tembarom had been different.
He had kept himself well in hand. Yes, she had liked T. Tembarom, and
as she packed the trunks she realized that the Atlantic Ocean was
three thousand miles across, and when two people who had no money were
separated by it, they were likely to remain so. Rich people could
travel, poor people couldn't. You just stayed where things took you,
and you mustn't be silly enough to expect things to happen in your
class of life--things like seeing people again. Your life just went
on. She kept herself very busy, and did not allow her thoughts any
latitude. It would vex her father very much if he thought she had
really grown fond of America and was rather sorry to go away. She had
finished her packing before evening, and the trunks were labeled and
set aside, some in the outside hall and some in the corner of the
room. She had sat down with some mending on her lap, and Hutchinson
was walking about the room with the restlessness of the traveler whose
approaching journey will not let him settle himself anywhere.
"I'll lay a shilling you've got everything packed and ready, and put
just where a chap can lay his hands on it," he said.
"Yes, Father. Your tweed cap's in the big pocket of your thick top-
coat, and there's an extra pair of spectacles and your pipe and
tobacco in the small one."
"And off we go back to England same as we came!" He rubbed his head,
and drew a big, worried sigh. "Where's them going?" he asked, pointing
to some newly laundered clothing on a side table. "You haven't
forgotten 'em, have you?"
"No, Father. It's just some of the young men's washing. I thought I'd
take time to mend them up a bit before I went to bed."
"That's like tha mother, too--taking care of everybody. What did these
chaps do before you came?"
"Sometimes they tried to sew on a button or so themselves, but oftener
they went without. Men make poor work of sewing. It oughtn't to be
expected of them."
Hutchinson stopped and looked her and her mending over with a touch of
curiosity.
"Some of them's Tembarom's?" he asked.
Little Ann held up a pair of socks.
"These are. He does wear them out, poor fellow. It's tramping up and
down the streets to save car-fare does it. He's never got a heel to
his name. But he's going to be able to buy some new ones next week."
Hutchinson began his tramp again.
"He'll miss thee, Little Ann; but so'll the other lads, for that
matter."
"He'll know to-night whether Mr. Galton's going to let him keep his
work. I do hope he will. I believe he'd begin to get on."
"Well,"--Hutchinson was just a little grudging even at this
comparatively lenient moment,--"I believe the chap'll get on myself.
He's got pluck and he's sharp. I never saw him make a poor mouth yet."
"Neither did I," answered Ann.
A door leading into Tembarom's hall bedroom opened on to Hutchinson's.
They both heard some one inside the room knock at it. Hutchinson
turned and listened, jerking his head toward the sound.
"There's that poor chap again," he said. "He's wakened and got
restless. What's Tembarom going to do with him, I'd like to know? The
money won't last forever."
"Shall I let him in, Father? I dare say he's got restless because Mr.
Tembarom's not come in."
"Aye, we'll let him in. He won't have thee long. He can't do no harm
so long as I'm here."
Little Ann went to the door and opened it. She spoke quietly.
"Do you want to come in here, Mr. Strangeways?"
The man came in. He was clean, but still unshaven, and his clothes
looked as though he had been lying down. He looked round the room
anxiously.
"Where has he gone?" he demanded in an overstrung voice. "Where is
he?" He caught at Ann's sleeve in a sudden access of nervous fear.
"What shall I do if he's gone?"
Hutchinson moved toward him.
"'Ere, 'ere," he said, "don't you go catchin' hold of ladies. What do
you want?"
I've forgotten his name now. What shall I do if I can't remember?"
faltered Strangeways.
Little Ann patted his arm comfortingly.
"There, there, now! You've not really forgotten it. It's just slipped
your memory. You want Mr. Tembarom--Mr. T. Tembarom."
"Oh, thank you, thank you. That's it. Yes, Tembarom. He said T.
Tembarom. He said he wouldn't throw me over."
Little Ann led him to a seat and made him sit down. She answered him
with quiet decision.
"Well, if he said he wouldn't, he won't. Will he, Father?"
"No, he won't." There was rough good nature in Hutchinson's admission.
He paused after it to glance at Ann. "You think a lot of that lad,
don't you, Ann?"
"Yes, I do, Father," she replied undisturbedly. "He's one you can
trust, too. He's up-town at his work," she explained to Strangeways.
"He'll be back before long. He's giving us a bit of a supper in here
because we're going away."
Strangeways grew nervous again.
"But he won't go with you? T. Tembarom won't go?"
"No, no; he's not going. He'll stay here," she said soothingly. He had
evidently not observed the packed and labeled trunks when he came in.
He seemed suddenly to see them now, and rose in distress.
"Whose are these? You said he wasn't going?"
Ann took hold of his arm and led him to the corner.
"They are not Mr. Tembarom's trunks," she explained. "They are
father's and mine. Look on the labels. Joseph Hutchinson, Liverpool.
Ann Hutchinson, Liverpool."
He looked at them closely in a puzzled way. He read a label aloud in a
dragging voice.
"Ann Hutchinson, Liverpool. What's--what's Liverpool?
"Oh, come," encouraged Little Ann, "you know that. It's a place in
England. We're going back to England."
He stood and gazed fixedly before him. Then he began to rub his
fingers across his forehead. Ann knew the straining look in his eyes.
He was making that horrible struggle to get back somewhere through the
darkness which shut him in. It was so painful a thing to see that even
Hutchinson turned slightly away.
"Don't!" said Little Ann, softly, and tried to draw him away.
He caught his breath convulsively once or twice, and his voice dragged
out words again, as though he were dragging them from bottomless
depths.
"Going--back--to--England--back to England--to England."
He dropped into a chair near by, his arms thrown over its back, and
broke, as his face fell upon them, into heavy, deadly sobbing--the
kind of sobbing Tembarom had found it impossible to stand up against.
Hutchinson whirled about testily.
"Dang it!" he broke out, "I wish Tembarom'd turn up. What are we to
do?" He didn't like it himself. It struck him as unseemly.
But Ann went to the chair, and put her hands on the shuddering
shoulder, bending over the soul-wrung creature, the wisdom of
centuries in the soft, expostulatory voice which seemed to reach the
very darkness he was lost in. It was a wisdom of which she was wholly
unaware, but it had been born with her, and was the building of her
being.
"'Sh! 'S-h-h!" she said. "You mustn't do that. Mr. Tembarom wouldn't
like you to do it. He'll be in directly. 'Sh! 'Sh, now!" And simple as
the words were, their soothing reached him. The wildness of his sobs
grew less.
"See here," Hutchinson protested, "this won't do, my man. I won't have
it, Ann. I'm upset myself, what with this going back and everything. I
can't have a chap coming and crying like that there. It upsets me
worse than ever. And you hangin' over him! It won't do."
Strangeways lifted his head from his arms and looked at him.
"Aye, I mean what I say," Hutchinson added fretfully.
Strangeways got up from the chair. When he was not bowed or slouching
it was to be seen that he was a tall man with square shoulders.
Despite his unshaven, haggard face, he had a sort of presence.
"I'll go back to my room," he said. "I forgot. I ought not to be
here."
Neither Hutchinson nor Little Ann had ever seen any one do the thing
he did next. When Ann went with him to the door of the hall bedroom,
he took her hand, and bowing low before her, lifted it gently to his
lips.
Hutchinson stared at him as he turned into the room and closed the
door behind him.
"Well, I've read of lords and ladies doin' that in books," he said,
"but I never thought I should see a chap do it myself."
Little Ann went back to her mending, looking very thoughtful.
"Father," she said, after a few moments, "England made him come near
to remembering something."
"New York'll come near making me remember a lot of things when I'm out
of it," said Mr. Hutchinson, sitting down heavily in his chair and
rubbing his head. "Eh, dang it! dang it!"
"Don't you let it, Father," advised Little Ann. "There's never any
good in thinking things over."
"You're not as cheerful yourself as you let on," he said. "You've not
got much color to-day, my lass."
She rubbed one cheek a little, trying to laugh.
"I shall get it back when we go and stay with grandmother. It's just
staying indoors so much. Mr. Tembarom won't be long now; I'll get up
and set the table. The things are on a tray outside."
As she was going out of the room, Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger
appeared at the door.
"May we come in?" Jim asked eagerly. "We're invited to the oyster
stew, and it's time old T. T. was here. Julius and me are just getting
dippy waiting up-stairs to hear if he's made good with Galton."
"Well, now, you sit down and be quiet a bit, or you'll be losing your
appetites," advised Ann.
"You can't lose a thing the size of mine," answered Jim, "any more
than you could lose the Metropolitan Opera-house."
Ann turned her head and paused as though she were listening. She heard
footsteps in the lower hall.
"He's coming now," she announced. "I know his step. He's tired. Don't
go yet, you two," she added as the pair prepared to rush to meet him.
"When any one's that tired he wants to wash his face, and talk when
he's ready. If you'll just go back to your room I'll call you when
I've set the table."
She felt that she wanted a little more quiet during the next few
minutes than she could have if they remained and talked at the top of
elated voices. She had not quite realized how anxiously she had been
waiting all day for the hour when she would hear exactly what had
happened. If he was all right, it would be a nice thing to remember
when she was in England. In this moderate form she expressed herself
mentally. "It would be a nice thing to remember." She spread the cloth
on the table and began to lay out the plates. Involuntarily she found
herself stopping to glance at the hall bedroom door and listen rather
intently.
"I hope he's got it. I do that. I'm sure he has. He ought to."
Hutchinson looked over at her. She was that like her mother, that
lass!
"You're excited, Ann," he said.
"Yes, Father, I am--a bit. He's--he's washing his face now." Sounds of
splashing water could be heard through the intervening door.
Hutchinson watched her with some uneasiness.
"You care a lot for that lad," he said.
She did not look fluttered. Her answer was quite candid.
"I said I did, Father. He's taking off his boots."
"You know every sound he makes, and you're going away Saturday, and
you'll never see him again."
"That needn't stop me caring. It never did any one any harm to care
for one of his sort."
"But it can't come to anything," Hutchinson began to bluster. "It
won't do--"
"He's coming to the door, he's turning the handle," said Little Ann.
Tembarom came in. He was fresh with recent face-washing, and his hair
was damp, so that a short lock curled and stood up. He had been up-
town making frantic efforts for hours, but he had been making them in
a spirit of victorious relief, and he did not look tired at all.
"I've got it!" he cried out the moment he entered. "I've got it, by
jingo! The job's mine for keeps."
"Galton's give it to you out and out?" Hutchinson was slightly excited
himself.
"He's in the bulliest humor you ever saw. He says I've done first-
rate, and if I go on, he'll run me up to thirty."
"Well, I'm danged glad of it, lad, that I am!" Hutchinson gave in
handsomely. "You put backbone into it."
Little Ann stood near, smiling. Her smile met Tembarom's.
"I know you're glad, Little Ann," he said. "I'd never have got there
but for you. It was up to me, after the way you started me."
"You know I'm glad without me telling you," she answered. "I'm
RIGHTDOWN glad."
And it was at this moment that Mrs. Bowse came into the room.
"It's too bad it's happened just now," she said, much flustered.
"That's the way with things. The stew'll spoil, but he says it's real
important."
Tembarom caught at both her hands and shook them.
"I've got it, Mrs. Bowse. Here's your society reporter! The best-
looking boarder you've got is going to be able to pay his board
steady."
"I'm as glad as can be, and so will everybody be. I knew you'd get it.
But this gentleman's been here twice to-day. He says he really must
see you."
"Let him wait," Hutchinson ordered. "What's the chap want? The stew
won't be fit to eat."
"No, it won't," answered Mrs. Bowse; "but he seems to think he's not
the kind to be put off. He says it's more Mr. Tembarom's business than
his. He looked real mad when I showed him into the parlor, where they
were playing the pianola. He asked wasn't there a private room where
you could talk."
A certain flurried interest in the manner of Mrs. Bowse, a something
not usually awakened by inopportune callers, an actual suggestion of
the possible fact that she was not as indifferent as she was nervous,
somewhat awakened Mr. Hutchinson's curiosity.
"Look here," he volunteered," if he's got any real business, he can't
talk over to the tune of the pianola you can bring him up here,
Tembarom. I'll see he don't stay long if his business isn't worth
talkin' about. He'll see the table set for supper, and that'll hurry
him."
"Oh, gee I wish he hadn't come!" said Tembarom. "I'll just go down and
see what he wants. No one's got any swell private business with me."
"You bring him up if he has," said Hutchinson. "We'd like to hear
about it."
Tembarom ran down the stairs quickly.
No one had ever wanted to see him on business before. There was
something important-sounding about it; perhaps things were starting up
for him in real earnest. It might be a message from Galton, though he
could not believe that he had at this early stage reached such a
distinction. A ghastly thought shot a bolt at him, but he shook
himself free of it.
"He's not a fellow to go back on his word, anyhow," he insisted.
There were more boarders than usual in the parlor. The young woman
from the notion counter had company; and one of her guests was playing
"He sut'nly was Good to Me" on the pianola with loud and steady tread
of pedal.
The new arrival had evidently not thought it worth his while to commit
himself to permanency by taking a seat. He was standing not far from
the door with a businesslike-looking envelop in one hand and a pince-
nez in the other, with which Tembarom saw he was rather fretfully
tapping the envelop as he looked about him. He was plainly taking in
the characteristics of the room, and was not leniently disposed toward
them. His tailor was clearly an excellent one, with entirely correct
ideas as to the cut and material which exactly befitted an elderly
gentleman of some impressiveness in the position, whatsoever it
happened to be, which he held. His face was not of a friendly type,
and his eyes held cold irritation discreetly restrained by
businesslike civility. Tembarom vaguely felt the genialities of the
oyster supper assume a rather fourth-rate air.
The caller advanced and spoke first.
"Mr. Tembarom?" he inquired.
"Yes," Tembarom answered, "I'm T. Tembarom."
"T.," repeated the stranger, with a slightly puzzled expression. "Ah,
yes; I see. I beg pardon."
In that moment Tembarom felt that he was looked over, taken in, summed
up, and without favor. The sharp, steady eye, however, did not seem to
have moved from his face. At the same time it had aided him to realize
that he was, to this well-dressed person at least, a too exhilarated
young man wearing a ten-dollar "hand-me-down."
"My name is Palford," he said concisely. "That will convey nothing to
you. I am of the firm of Palford & Grimby of Lincoln's Inn. This is my
card."
Tembarom took the card and read that Palford & Grimby were
"solicitors," and he was not sure that he knew exactly what
"solicitors" were.
"Lincoln's Inn?" he hesitated. "That's not in New York, is it?"
"No, Mr. Tembarom; in London. I come from England."
"You must have had bad weather crossing," said Tembarom, with amiable
intent. Somehow Mr. Palford presented a more unyielding surface than
he was accustomed to. And yet his hard courtesy was quite perfect.
"I have been here some weeks."
"I hope you like New York. Won't you have a seat?"
The young lady from the notion counter and her friends began to sing
the chorus of "He sut'nly was Good to Me" with quite professional
negro accent.
"That's just the way May Irwin done it," one of them laughed.
Mr. Palford glanced at the performers. He did not say whether he liked
New York or not.
"I asked your landlady if we could not see each other in a private
room," he said. "It would not be possible to talk quietly here."
"We shouldn't have much of a show," answered Tembarom, inwardly
wishing he knew what was going to happen. "But there are no private
rooms in the house. We can be quieter than this, though, if we go up
stairs to Mr. Hutchinson's room. He said I could bring you."
"That would be much better," replied Mr. Palford.
Tembarom led him out of the room, up the first steep and narrow flight
of stairs, along the narrow hall to the second, up that, down another
hall to the third, up the third, and on to the fourth. As he led the
way he realized again that the worn carpets, the steep narrowness, and
the pieces of paper unfortunately stripped off the wall at intervals,
were being rather counted against him. This man had probably never
been in a place like this before in his life, and he didn't take to
it.
At the Hutchinsons' door he stopped and explained:
"We were going to have an oyster stew here because the Hutchinsons are
going away; but Mr. Hutchinson said we could come up."
"Very kind of Mr. Hutchinson, I'm sure."
Despite his stiffly collected bearing, Mr. Palford looked perhaps
slightly nervous when he was handed into the bed-sitting-room, and
found himself confronting Hutchinson and Little Ann and the table set
for the oyster stew. It is true that he had never been in such a place
in his life, that for many reasons he was appalled, and that he was
beset by a fear that he might be grotesquely compelled by existing
circumstances to accept these people's invitation, if they insisted
upon his sitting down with them and sharing their oyster stew. One
could not calculate on what would happen among these unknown
quantities. It might be their idea of boarding-house politeness. And
how could one offend them? God forbid that the situation should
intensify itself in such an absurdly trying manner! What a bounder the
unfortunate young man was! His own experience had not been such as to
assist him to any realistic enlightenment regarding him, even when he
had seen the society page and had learned that he had charge of it.
"Let me make you acquainted with Mr. and Miss Hutchinson," Tembarom
introduced. "This is Mr. Palford, Mr. Hutchinson."
Hutchinson, half hidden behind his newspaper, jerked his head and
grunted:
"Glad to see you, sir."
Mr. Palford bowed, and took the chair Tembarom presented.
"I am much obliged to you, Mr. Hutchinson, for allowing me to come to
your room. I have business to discuss with Mr. Tembarom, and the
pianola was being played down-stairs--rather loudly."
"They do it every night, dang 'em! Right under my bed," growled
Hutchinson. "You're an Englishman, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"So am I, thank God! " Hutchinson devoutly gave forth.
Little Ann rose from her chair, sewing in hand.
"Father'll come and sit with me in my room," she said.
Hutchinson looked grumpy. He did not intend to leave the field clear
and the stew to its fate if he could help it. He gave Ann a protesting
frown.
"I dare say Mr. Palford doesn't mind us," he said. "We're not
strangers."
"Not in the least," Palford protested. "Certainly not. If you are old
friends, you may be able to assist us."
"Well, I don't know about that," Hutchinson answered, "We've not known
him long, but we know him pretty well. You come from London, don't
you? "
"Yes. From Lincoln's Inn Fields."
"Law?" grunted Hutchinson.
"Yes. Of the firm of Palford & Grimby."
Hutchinson moved in his chair involuntarily. There was stimulation to
curiosity in this. This chap was a regular top sawyer--clothes, way of
pronouncing his words, manners, everything. No mistaking him--old
family solicitor sort of chap. What on earth could he have to say to
Tembarom? Tembarom himself had sat down and could not be said to look
at his ease.
"I do not intrude without the excuse of serious business," Palford
explained to him. "A great deal of careful research and inquiry has
finally led me here. I am compelled to believe I have followed the
right clue, but I must ask you a few questions. Your name is not
really Tembarom, is it?"
Hutchinson looked at Tembarom sharply.
"Not Tembarom? What does he mean, lad?"
Tembarom's grin was at once boyish and ashamed.
"Well, it is in one way," he answered, "and it isn't in another. The
fellows at school got into the way of calling me that way,--to save
time, I guess,--and I got to like it. They'd have guyed my real name.
Most of them never knew it. I can't see why any one ever called a
child by such a fool name, anyhow."
"What was it exactly?"
Tembarom looked almost sheepish.
"It sounds like a thing in a novel. It was Temple Temple Barholm. Two
Temples, by gee! As if one wasn't enough!"
Joseph Hutchinson dropped his paper and almost started from his chair.
His red face suddenly became so much redder that he looked a trifle
apoplectic.
"Temple Barholm does tha say?" he cried out.
Mr. Palford raised his hand and checked him, but with a suggestion of
stiff apology.
"If you will kindly allow me. Did you ever hear your father refer to a
place called Temple Barholm?" he inquired.
Tembarom reflected as though sending his thoughts backward into a
pretty thoroughly forgotten and ignored past. There had been no reason
connected with filial affection which should have caused him to recall
memories of his father. They had not liked each other. He had known
that he had been resented and looked down upon as a characteristically
American product. His father had more than once said he was a "common
American lad," and he had known he was.
"Seems to me," he said at last, "that once when he was pretty mad at
his luck I heard him grumbling about English laws, and he said some of
his distant relations were swell people who would never think of
speaking to him,--perhaps didn't know he was alive,--and they lived in
a big way in a place that was named after the family. He never saw it
or them, and he said that was the way in England--one fellow got
everything and the rest were paupers like himself. He'd always been
poor."
"Yes, the relation was a distant one. Until this investigation began
the family knew nothing of him. The inquiry has been a tiresome one. I
trust I am reaching the end of it. We have given nearly two years to
following this clue."
"What for?" burst forth Tembarom, sitting upright.
"Because it was necessary to find either George Temple Barholm or his
son, if he had one."
"I'm his son, all right, but he died when I was eight years old,"
Tembarom volunteered. "I don't remember much about him."
"You remember that he was not an American?"
"He was English. Hated it; but he wasn't fond of America."
"Have you any papers belonging to him?"
Tembarom hesitated again.
"There's a few old letters--oh, and one of those glass photographs in
a case. I believe it's my grandfather and grandmother, taken when they
were married. Him on a chair, you know, and her standing with her hand
on his shoulder."
"Can you show them to me?" Palford suggested.
"Sure," Tembarom answered, getting up from his seat "They're in my
room. I turned them up yesterday among some other things."
When he left them, Mr. Palford sat gently rubbing his chin. Hutchinson
wanted to burst forth with questions, but he looked so remote and
acidly dignified that there was a suggestion of boldness in the idea
of intruding on his reflections. Hutchinson stared at him and breathed
hard and short in his suspense. The stiff old chap was thinking things
over and putting things together in his lawyer's way. He was entirely
oblivious to his surroundings. Little Ann went on with her mending,
but she wore her absorbed look, and it was not a result of her work.
Tembarom came back with some papers in his hand. They were yellowed
old letters, and on the top of the package there was a worn
daguerreotype-case with broken clasp.
"Here they are," he said, giving them to Palford. "I guess they'd just
been married," opening the case. "Get on to her embroidered collar and
big breast-pin with his picture in it. That's English enough, isn't
it? He'd given it to her for a wedding-present. There's something in
one of the letters about it."
It was the letters to which Mr. Palford gave the most attention. He
read them and examined post-marks and dates. When he had finished, he
rose from his chair with a slightly portentous touch of professional
ceremony.
"Yes, those are sufficiently convincing. You are a very fortunate
young man. Allow me to congratulate you."
He did not look particularly pleased, though he extended his hand and
shook Tembarom's politely. He was rigorously endeavoring to conceal
that he found himself called upon to make the best of an extremely bad
job. Hutchinson started forward, resting his hands on his knees and
glaring with ill-suppressed excitement.
"What's that for?" Tembarom said. He felt rather like a fool. He
laughed half nervously. It seemed to be up to him to understand, and
he didn't understand in the least.
"You have, through your father's distant relationship, inherited a
very magnificent property--the estate of Temple Barholm in
Lancashire," Palford began to explain, but Mr. Hutchinson sprang from
his chair outright, crushing his paper in his hand.
"Temple Barholm!" he almost shouted, "I dunnot believe thee! Why, it's
one of th' oldest places in England and one of th' biggest. Th' Temple
Barholms as didn't come over with th' Conqueror was there before him.
Some of them was Saxon kings! And him--" pointing a stumpy, red finger
disparagingly at Tembarom, aghast and incredulous--"that New York lad
that's sold newspapers in the streets--you say he's come into it?"
"Precisely." Mr. Palford spoke with some crispness of diction. Noise
and bluster annoyed him. "That is my business here. Mr. Tembarom is,
in fact, Mr. Temple Temple Barholm of Temple Barholm, which you seem
to have heard of."
"Heard of it! My mother was born in the village an' lives there yet.
Art tha struck dumb, lad!" he said almost fiercely to Tembarom. "By
Judd! Tha well may be!"
Tembarom was standing holding the back of a chair. He was pale, and
had once opened his mouth, and then gulped and shut it. Little Ann had
dropped her sewing. His first look had leaped to her, and she had
looked back straight into his eyes.
"I'm struck something," he said, his half-laugh slightly unsteady.
"Who'd blame me?"
"You'd better sit down," said Little Ann. "Sudden things are
upsetting."
He did sit down. He felt rather shaky. He touched himself on his chest
and laughed again.
"Me!" he said. "T. T.! Hully gee! It's like a turn at a vaudeville."
The sentiment prevailing in Hutchinson's mind seemed to verge on
indignation.
"Thee th' master of Temple Barholm! " he ejaculated. "Why, it stood
for seventy thousand pound' a year!"
"It did and it does," said Mr. Palford, curtly. He had less and less
taste for the situation. There was neither dignity nor proper
sentiment in it. The young man was utterly incapable of comprehending
the meaning and proportions of the extraordinary event which had
befallen him. It appeared to present to him the aspect of a somewhat
slangy New York joke.
"You do not seem much impressed, Mr. Temple Barholm," he said.
"Oh, I'm impressed, all right," answered Tembarom, "but, say, this
thing can't be true! You couldn't make it true if you sat up all night
to do it."
"When I go into the business details of the matter tomorrow morning
you will realize the truth of it," said Mr. Palford. "Seventy thousand
pounds a year--and Temple Barholm--are not unsubstantial facts."
"Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, my lad--that's what it
stands for!" put in Mr. Hutchinson.
"Well," said Tembarom, "I guess I can worry along on that if I try
hard enough. I mayn't be able to keep myself in the way I've been used
to, but I've got to make it do."
Mr. Palford stiffened. He did not know that the garish, flippant-
sounding joking was the kind of defense the streets of New York had
provided Mr. Temple Barholm with in many an hour when he had been a
half-clad newsboy with an empty stomach, and a bundle of unsold
newspapers under his arm.
"You are jocular," he said. "I find the New Yorkers are given to being
jocular--continuously."
Tembarom looked at him rather searchingly. Palford wouldn't have found
it possible to believe that the young man knew all about his distaste
and its near approach to disgust, that he knew quite well what he
thought of his ten-dollar suit, his ex-newsboy's diction, and his
entire incongruousness as a factor in any circumstances connected with
dignity and splendor. He would certainly not have credited the fact
that though he had not the remotest idea what sort of a place Temple
Barholm was, and what sort of men its long line of possessors had
been, he had gained a curious knowledge of their significance through
the mental attitude of their legal representative when he for a moment
failed to conceal his sense of actual revolt.
"It seems sort of like a joke till you get on to it," he said. "But I
guess it ain't such a merry jest as it seems."
And then Mr. Palford did begin to observe that he had lost his color
entirely; also that he had a rather decent, sharp-cut face, and
extremely white and good young teeth, which he showed not
unattractively when he smiled. And he smiled frequently, but he was
not smiling now.
CHAPTER VII
In the course of the interview given to the explaining of business and
legal detail which took place between Mr. Palford and his client the
following morning, Tembarom's knowledge of his situation extended
itself largely, and at the same time added in a proportionate degree
to his sense of his own incongruity as connected with it. He sat at a
table in Palford's private sitting-room at the respectable, old-
fashioned hotel the solicitor had chosen - sat and listened, and
answered questions and asked them, until his head began to feel as
though it were crammed to bursting with extraordinary detail.
It was all extraordinary to him. He had had no time for reading and no
books to read, and therefore knew little of fiction. He was entirely
ignorant of all romance but such as the New York papers provided. This
was highly colored, but it did not deal with events connected with the
possessors of vast English estates and the details of their habits and
customs. His geographical knowledge of Great Britain was simple and
largely incorrect. Information concerning its usual conditions and
aspects had come to him through talk of international marriages and
cup races, and had made but little impression upon him. He liked New
York - its noise, its streets, its glare, its Sunday newspapers, with
their ever-increasing number of sheets, and pictures of everything on
earth which could be photographed. His choice, when he could allow
himself a fifty-cent seat at the theater, naturally ran to productions
which were farcical or cheerfully musical. He had never reached
serious drama, perhaps because he had never had money enough to pay
for entrance to anything like half of the "shows" the other fellows
recommended. He was totally unprepared for the facing of any kind of
drama as connected with himself. The worst of it was that it struck
him as being of the nature of farce when regarded from the normal New
York point of view. If he had somehow had the luck to come into the
possession of money in ways which were familiar to him, - to "strike
it rich" in the way of a "big job" or "deal," - he would have been
better able to adjust himself to circumstances. He might not have
known how to spend his money, but he would have spent it in New York
on New York joys. There would have been no foreign remoteness about
the thing, howsoever fantastically unexpected such fortune might have
been. At any rate, in New York he would have known the names of places
and things.
Through a large part of his interview with Palford his elbow rested on
the table, and he held his chin with his hand and rubbed it
thoughtfully. The last Temple Temple Barholm had been an eccentric and
uncompanionable person. He had lived alone and had not married. He had
cherished a prejudice against the man who would have succeeded him as
next of kin if he had not died young. People had been of the opinion
that he had disliked him merely because he did not wish to be reminded
that some one else must some day inevitably stand in his shoes, and
own the possessions of which he himself was arrogantly fond. There
were always more female Temple Barholms than male ones, and the
families were small. The relative who had emigrated to Brooklyn had
been a comparatively unknown person. His only intercourse with the
head of the house had been confined to a begging letter, written from
America when his circumstances were at their worst. It was an ill-
mannered and ill-expressed letter, which had been considered
presuming, and had been answered chillingly with a mere five-pound
note, clearly explained as a final charity. This begging letter, which
bitterly contrasted the writer's poverty with his indifferent
relative's luxuries, had, by a curious trick of chance which preserved
it, quite extraordinarily turned up during an examination of
apparently unimportant, forgotten papers, and had furnished a clue in
the search for next of kin. The writer had greatly annoyed old Mr.
Temple Barholm by telling him that he had called his son by his name -
"not that there was ever likely to be anything in it for him." But a
waif of the New York streets who was known as "Tem" or "Tembarom" was
not a link easily attached to any chain, and the search had been long
and rather hopeless. It had, however, at last reached Mrs. Bowse's
boarding-house and before Mr. Palford sat Mr. Temple Temple Barholm, a
cheap young man in cheap clothes, and speaking New York slang with a
nasal accent. Mr. Palford, feeling him appalling and absolutely
without the pale, was still aware that he stood in the position of an
important client of the firm of Palford & Grimby. There was a section
of the offices at Lincoln's Inn devoted to documents representing a
lifetime of attention to the affairs of the Temple Barholm estates. It
was greatly to be hoped that the crass ignorance and commonness of
this young outsider would not cause impossible complications.
"He knows nothing! He knows nothing!" Palford found himself forced to
exclaim mentally not once, but a hundred times, in the course of their
talk.
There was - this revealed itself as the interview proceeded - just one
slight palliation of his impossible benightedness: he was not the kind
of young man who, knowing nothing, huffily protects himself by
pretending to know everything. He was of an unreserve concerning his
ignorance which his solicitor felt sometimes almost struck one in the
face. Now and then it quite made one jump. He was singularly free from
any vestige of personal vanity. He was also singularly unready to take
offense. To the head of the firm of Palford & Grimby, who was not
accustomed to lightness of manner, and inclined to the view that a
person who made a joke took rather a liberty with him, his tendency to
be jocular, even about himself and the estate of Temple Barholm, was
irritating and somewhat disrespectful. Mr. Palford did not easily
comprehend jokes of any sort; especially was he annoyed by cryptic
phraseology and mammoth exaggeration. For instance, be could not in
the least compass Mr. Temple Barholm's meaning when he casually
remarked that something or other was "all to the merry"; or again,
quite as though he believed that he was using reasonable English
figures of speech, "The old fellow thought he was the only pebble on
the beach." In using the latter expression he had been referring to
the late Mr. Temple Barholm; but what on earth was his connection with
the sea-shore and pebbles? When confronted with these baffling
absurdities, Mr. Palford either said, "I beg pardon," or stiffened and
remained silent.
When Tembarom learned that he was the head of one of the oldest
families in England, no aspect of the desirable dignity of his
position reached him in the least.
"Well," he remarked, "there's quite a lot of us can go back to Adam
and Eve."
When he was told that he was lord of the manor of Temple Barholm, he
did not know what a manor was.
"What's a manor, and what happens if you're lord of it?" he asked.
He had not heard of William the Conqueror, and did not appear moved to
admiration of him, though he owned that he seemed to have "put it
over."
"Why didn't he make a republic of it while he was about it?" he said.
"But I guess that wasn't his kind. He didn't do all that fighting for
his health."
His interest was not alone totally dissevered from the events of past
centuries; it was as dissevered from those of mere past years. The
habits, customs, and points of view of five years before seemed to
have been cast into a vast waste-paper basket as wholly unpractical in
connection with present experiences.
"A man that's going to keep up with the procession can't waste time
thinking about yesterday. What he's got to do is to keep his eye on
what's going to happen the week after next," he summed it up.
Rather to Mr. Palford's surprise, he did not speak lightly, but with a
sort of inner seriousness. It suggested that he had not arrived at
this conclusion without the aid of sharp experience. Now and then one
saw a touch of this profound practical perception in him.
It was not to be denied that he was clear-headed enough where purely
practical business detail was concerned. He was at first plainly
rather stunned by the proportions presented to him, but his questions
were direct and of a common-sense order not to be despised.
"I don't know anything about it yet," he said once. "It's all Dutch to
me. I can't calculate in half-crowns and pounds and half pounds, but
I'm going to find out. I've got to."
It was extraordinary and annoying to feel that one must explain
everything; but this impossible fellow was not an actual fool on all
points, and he did not seem to be a weakling. He might learn certain
things in time, and at all events one was no further personally
responsible for him and his impossibilities than the business concerns
of his estate would oblige any legal firm to be. Clients, whether
highly desirable or otherwise, were no more than clients. They were
not relatives whom one must introduce to one's friends. Thus Mr.
Palford, who was not a specially humane or sympathetic person,
mentally decided. He saw no pathos in this raw young man, who would
presently find himself floundering unaided in waters utterly unknown
to him. There was even a touch of bitter amusement in the solicitor's
mind as he glanced toward the future.
He explained with detail the necessity for their immediate departure
for the other side of the Atlantic. Certain legal formalities which
must at once be attended to demanded their presence in England.
Foreseeing this, on the day when he had finally felt himself secure as
to the identity of his client he had taken the liberty of engaging
optionally certain state-rooms on the Adriana, sailing the following
Wednesday.
"Subject of course to your approval," he added politely. "But it is
imperative that we should be on the spot as early as possible." He did
not mention that he himself was abominably tired of his sojourn on
alien shores, and wanted to be back in London in his own chambers,
with his own club within easy reach.
Tembarom's face changed its expression. He had been looking rather
weighted down and fatigued, and he lighted up to eagerness.
"Say," he exclaimed, "why couldn't we go on the Transatlantic on
Saturday?"
"It is one of the small, cheap boats," objected Palford.
"The accommodation would be most inferior."
Tembarom leaned forward and touched his sleeve in hasty, boyish
appeal.
"I want to go on it," he said; "I want to go steerage."
Palford stared at him.
"You want to go on the Transatlantic! Steerage!" he ejaculated, quite
aghast. This was a novel order of madness to reveal itself in the
recent inheritor of a great fortune.
Tembarom's appeal grew franker; it took on the note of a too crude
young fellow's misplaced confidence.
"You do this for me," he said. "I'd give a farm to go on that boat.
The Hutchinsons are sailing on it - Mr. and Miss Hutchinson, the ones
you saw at the house last night."
"I - it is really impossible." Mr. Palford hesitated. "As to steerage,
my dear Mr. Temple Barholm, you - you can't."
Tembarom got up and stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
It seemed to be a sort of expression of his sudden hopeful excitement.
"Why not " he said. "If I own about half of England and have money to
burn, I guess I can buy a steerage passage on a nine-day steamer."
"You can buy anything you like," Palford answered stiffly. "It is not
a matter of buying. But I should not be conducting myself properly
toward you if I allowed it. It would not be - becoming."
"Becoming!" cried Tembarom, "Thunder! It's not a spring bat. I tell
you I want to go just that way."
Palford saw abnormal breakers ahead. He felt that he would be glad
when be had landed his charge safely at Temple Barholm. Once there,
his family solicitor was not called upon to live with him and hobnob
with his extraordinary intimates.
"As to buying," he said, still with marked lack of enthusiasm,
"instead of taking a steerage passage on the Transatlantic yourself,
you might no doubt secure first-class state-rooms for Mr. and Miss
Hutchinson on the Adriana, though I seriously advise against it."
Tembarom shook his head.
"You don't know them," he said. "They wouldn't let me. Hutchinson's a
queer old fellow and he's had the hardest kind of luck, but he's as
proud as they make 'em. Me butt in and offer to pay their passage
back, as if they were paupers, just because I've suddenly struck it
rich! Hully gee! I guess not. A fellow that's been boosted up in the
air all in a minute, as I have, has got to lie pretty low to keep
folks from wanting to kick him, anyhow. Hutchinson's a darned sight
smarter fellow than I am, and he knows it--and he's Lancashire, you
bet." He stopped a minute and flushed. "As to Little Ann," he said--
"me make that sort of a break with HER! Well, I should be a fool."
Palford was a cold-blooded and unimaginative person, but a long legal
experience had built up within him a certain shrewdness of perception.
He had naturally glanced once or twice at the girl sitting still at
her mending, and he had observed that she said very little and had a
singularly quiet, firm little voice.
"I beg pardon. You are probably right. I had very little conversation
with either of them. Miss Hutchinson struck me as having an
intelligent face."
"She's a wonder," said Tembarom, devoutly. "She's just a wonder."
"Under the circumstances," suggested Mr. Palford, "it might not be a
bad idea to explain to her your idea of the steerage passage. An
intelligent girl can often give excellent advice. You will probably
have an opportunity of speaking to her tonight. Did you say they were
sailing to-morrow?"
To-morrow! That brought it so near that it gave Tembarom a shock. He
had known that they sailed on Saturday, and now Saturday had become
to-morrow. Things began to surge through his mind--all sorts of things
he had no time to think of clearly, though it was true they had darted
vaguely about in the delirious excitement of the night, during which
he had scarcely slept at all. His face changed again, and the appeal
died out of it. He began to look anxious and restless.
"Yes, they're going to-morrow," he answered.
"You see," argued Mr. Palford, with conviction, "how impossible it
would be for us to make any arrangements in so few hours. You will
excuse my saying," he added punctiliously, "that I could not make the
voyage in the steerage."
Tembarom laughed. He thought he saw him doing it.
"That's so," he said. Then, with renewed hope, he added, "Say, I 'm
going to try and get them to wait till Wednesday."
"I do not think--" Mr. Palford began, and then felt it wiser to leave
things as they were. "But I'm not qualified to give an opinion. I do
not know Miss Hutchinson at all."
But the statement was by no means frank. He had a private conviction
that he did know her to a certain degree. And he did.
CHAPTER VIII
There was a slight awkwardness even to Tembarom in entering the
dining-room that evening. He had not seen his fellow boarders, as his
restless night had made him sleep later than usual. But Mrs. Bowse had
told him of the excitement he had caused.
"They just couldn't eat," she said. "They could do nothing but talk
and talk and ask questions; and I had waffles, too, and they got
stone-cold."
The babel of friendly outcry which broke out on his entry was made up
of jokes, ejaculations, questions, and congratulatory outbursts from
all sides.
"Good old T. T.!" "Give him a Harvard yell! Rah! Rah! Rah!" "Lend me
fifty-five cents?" "Where's your tiara?" "Darned glad of it!" "Make us
a speech!"
"Say, people," said Tembarom, "don't you get me rattled or I can't
tell you anything. I'm rattled enough already."
"Well, is it true?" called out Mr. Striper.
"No," Tembarom answered back, sitting down. "It couldn't be; that's
what I told Palford. I shall wake up in a minute or two and find
myself in a hospital with a peacherino of a trained nurse smoothing
'me piller.' You can't fool ME with a pipe-dream like this. Palford's
easier; he's not a New Yorker. He says it IS true, and I can't get out
of it."
"Whew! Great Jakes!" A long breath was exhaled all round the table.
"What are you, anyhow?" cried Jim Bowles across the dishes.
Tembarom rested his elbow on the edge of the table and began to check
off his points on his fingers.
"I'm this, he said: "I'm Temple Temple Barholm, Esquire, of Temple
Barholm, Lancashire, England. At the time of the flood my folks
knocked up a house just about where the ark landed, and I guess
they've held on to it ever since. I don't know what business they went
into, but they made money. Palford swears I've got three hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a year. I wasn't going to call the man a liar;
but I just missed it, by jings!"
He was trying to "bluff it out." Somehow he felt he had to. He felt it
more than ever when a momentary silence fell upon those who sat about
the table. It fell when he said "three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year." No one could find voice to make any remark for a few
seconds after that.
"Are you a lord--or a duke?" some one asked after breath had recovered
itself.
"No, I'm not," he replied with relief. "I just got out from under
that; but the Lord knows how I did it."
"What are you going to do first? " said Jim Bowles.
"I've got to go and 'take possession.' That's what Palford calls it.
I've been a lost heir for nearly two years, and I've got to show
myself."
Hutchinson had not joined the clamor of greeting, but had grunted
disapproval more than once. He felt that, as an Englishman, he had a
certain dignity to maintain. He knew something about big estates and
their owners. He was not like these common New York chaps, who
regarded them as Arabian Nights tales to make jokes about. He had
grown up as a village boy in proper awe of Temple Barholm. They were
ignorant fools, this lot. He had no patience with them. He had left
the village and gone to work in Manchester when he was a boy of
twelve, but as long as he had remained in his mother's cottage it had
been only decent good manners for him to touch his forehead
respectfully when a Temple Barholm, or a Temple Barholm guest or
carriage or pony phaeton, passed him by. And this chap was Mr. Temple
Temple Barholm himself! Lord save us!
Little Ann said nothing at all; but, then, she seldom said anything
during meal-times. When the rest of the boarders laughed, she ate her
dinner and smiled. Several times, despite her caution, Tembarom caught
her eye, and somehow held it a second with his. She smiled at him when
this happened; but there was something restless and eager in his look
which made her wish to evade it. She knew what he felt, and she knew
why he kept up his jokes and never once spoke seriously. She knew he
was not comfortable, and did not enjoy talking about hundreds of
thousands a year to people who worked hard for ten or twenty "per."
To-morrow morning was very near, she kept thinking. To-morrow night
she would be lying in her berth in the steerage, or more probably
taking care of her father, who would be very uncomfortable.
"What will Galton do? " Mr. Striper asked.
"I don't know," Tembarom answered, and he looked troubled. Three
hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year might not be able to give
aid to a wounded society page.
"What are you going to do with your Freak? " called out Julius
Steinberger.
Tembarom actually started. As things had surged over him, he had had
too much to think over. He had not had time to give to his strange
responsibility; it had become one nevertheless.
"Are you going to leave him behind when you go to England?"
He leaned forward and put his chin on his hand.
"Why, say," he said, as though he were thinking it out, "he's spoken
about England two or three times. He's said he must go there. By
jings! I'll take him with me, and see what'll happen."
When Little Ann got up to leave the room he followed her and her
father into the hall.
"May I come up and talk it over with you?" he appealed. "I've got to
talk to some one who knows something about it. I shall go dotty if I
don't. It's too much like a dream."
"Come on up when you're ready," answered Hutchinson. "Ann and me can
give you a tip or two."
"I'm going to be putting the last things in the trunks," said Ann,
"but I dare say you won't mind that. The express'll be here by eight
in the morning."
"0 Lord!" groaned Tembarom.
When he went up to the fourth floor a little later, Hutchinson had
fallen into a doze in his chair over his newspaper, and Ann was
kneeling by a trunk in the hall, folding small articles tightly, and
fitting them into corners. To Tembarom she looked even more than usual
like a slight child thing one could snatch up in one's arms and carry
about or set on one's knee without feeling her weight at all. An
inferior gas-jet on the wall just above her was doing its best with
the lot of soft, red hair, which would have been an untidy bundle if
it had not been hers.
Tembarom sat down on the trunk next to her.
"0 Little Ann!" he broke out under his breath, lest the sound of his
voice might check Hutchinson's steady snoring. "0 Little Ann!"
Ann leaned back, sitting upon her small heels, and looked up at him.
"You're all upset, and it's not to be wondered at, Mr. Temple
Barholm," she said.
"Upset! You're going away to-morrow morning! And, for the Lord's sake,
don't call me that!" he protested.
"You're going away yourself next Wednesday. And you ARE Mr. Temple
Barholm. You'll never be called anything else in England.
"How am I going to stand it?" he protested again. "How could a fellow
like me stand it! To be yanked out of good old New York, and set down
in a place like a museum, with Central Park round it, and called Mr.
Temple Temple Barholm instead of just 'Tem' or 'T. T.'! It's not
natural."
"What you must do, Mr. Temple Barholm, is to keep your head clear,
that's all," she replied maturely.
"Lord! if I'd got a head like yours!"
She seemed to take him in, with a benign appreciativeness, in his
entirety.
"Well, you haven't," she admitted, though quite without disparagement,
merely with slight reservation. "But you've got one like your own. And
it's a good head--when you try to think steady. Yours is a man's head,
and mine's only a woman's."
"It's Little Ann Hutchinson's, by gee!" said Tembarom, with feeling.
"Listen here, Mr. Tem--Temple Barholm," she went on, as nearly
disturbed as he had ever seen her outwardly. "It's a wonderful thing
that's happened to you. It's like a novel. That splendid place, that
splendid name! It seems so queer to think I should ever have talked to
a Mr. Temple Barholm as I've talked to you."
He leaned forward a little as though something drew him.
"But"--there was unsteady appeal in his voice--"you have liked me,
haven't you, Little Ann?"
Her own voice seemed to drop into an extra quietness that made it
remote. She looked down at her hands on her lap.
"Yes, I have liked you. I have told Father I liked you," she answered.
He got up, and made an impetuous rush at his goal.
"Then--say, I'm going in there to wake up Mr. Hutchinson and ask him
not to sail to-morrow morning."
"You'd better not wake him up," she answered, smiling; but he saw that
her face changed and flushed. "It's not a good time to ask Father
anything when he's just been waked up. And we HAVE to go. The express
is coming at eight."
"Send it away again; tell 'em you're not going. Tell 'em any old
thing. Little Ann, what's the matter with you? Something's the matter.
Have I made a break?"
He had felt the remoteness in her even before he had heard it in her
dropped voice. It had been vaguely there even when he sat down on the
trunk. Actually there was a touch of reserve about her, as though she
was keeping her little place with the self-respecting propriety of a
girl speaking to a man not of her own world.
"I dare say I've done some fool thing without knowing it. I don't know
where I'm at, anyhow," he said woefully.
"Don't look at me like that, Mr. Temple Barholm," she said--"as if I
was unkind. I--I'm NOT."
"But you're different," he implored. "I saw it the minute I came up. I
ran up-stairs just crazy to talk to you,--yes, crazy to talk to you--
and you--well, you were different. Why are you, if you're not mad?"
Then she rose and stood holding one of her neatly rolled packages in
her hand. Her eyes were soft and clear, and appealed maternally to his
reason.
"Because everything's different. You just think a bit," she answered.
He stared at her a few seconds, and then understanding of her dawned
upon him. He made a human young dash at her, and caught her arm.
"What!" he cried out. "You mean this Temple Barholm song and dance
makes things different? Not on your life! You're not the girl to work
that on me, as if it was my fault. You've got to hear me speak my
piece. Ann--you've just got to!"
He had begun to tremble a little, and she herself was not steady; but
she put a hand on his arm.
"Don't say anything you've not had time to think about," she said.
"I've been thinking of pretty near nothing else ever since I came
here. Just as soon as I looked at you across the table that first day
I saw my finish, and every day made me surer. I'd never had any
comfort or taking care of,--I didn't know the first thing about it,--
and it seemed as if all there was of it in the world was just in YOU."
"Did you think that?" she asked falteringly.
"Did I? That's how you looked to me, and it's how you look now. The
way you go about taking care of everybody and just handing out solid
little chunks of good sense to every darned fool that needs them, why-
-" There was a break in his voice--"why, it just knocked me out the
first round." He held her a little away from him, so that he could
yearn over her, though he did not know he was yearning. "See, I'd
sworn I'd never ask a girl to marry me until I could keep her. Well,
you know how it was, Ann. I couldn't have kept a goat, and I wasn't
such a fool that I didn't know it. I've been pretty sick when I
thought how it was; but I never worried you, did I?"
"No, you didn't."
"I just got busy. I worked like--well, I got busier than I ever was in
my life. When I got the page SURE, I let myself go a bit, sort of
hoping. And then this Temple Barholm thing hits me."
"That's the thing you've got to think of now," said Little Ann. "I'm
going to talk sensible to you."
"Don't, Ann! Good Lord! DON'T!"
"I MUST." She put her last tight roll into the trunk and tried to shut
the lid. "Please lock this for me."
He locked it, and then she seated herself on the top of it, though it
was rather high for her, and her small feet dangled. Her eyes looked
large and moist like a baby's, and she took out a handkerchief and
lightly touched them.
"You've made me want to cry a bit," she said, "but I'm not going to."
"Are you going to tell me you don't want me?" he asked, with anxious
eyes.
"No, I'm not."
"God bless you!" He was going to make a dash at her again, but pulled
himself up because he must. "No, by jings!" he said. "I'm not going to
till you let me."
"You see, it's true your head's not like mine," she said reasonably.
"Men's heads are mostly not like women's. They're men, of course, and
they're superior to women, but they're what I'd call more fluttery-
like. Women must remind them of things."
"What--what kind of things?"
"This kind. You see, Grandmother lives near Temple Barholm, and I know
what it's like, and you don't. And I've seen what seventy thousand
pounds a year means, and you haven't. And you've got to go and find
out for yourself."
"What's the matter with you coming along to help me?"
"I shouldn't help you; that's it. I should hold you back. I'm nothing
but Ann Hutchinson, and I talk Manchester-- and I drop my h's."
"I love to hear you drop your little h's all over the place," he burst
forth impetuously. "I love it."
She shook her head.
"The girls that go to garden-parties at Temple Barholm look like those
in the `Ladies' Pictorial', and they've got names and titles same as
those in novels."
He answered her in genuine anguish. He had never made any mistake
about her character, and she was beginning to make him feel afraid of
her in the midst of his adoration.
"What do I want with a girl out of a magazine?" he cried. "Where
should I hang her up?"
She was not unfeeling, but unshaken and she went on:
"I should look like a housemaid among them. How would you feel with a
wife of that sort, when the other sort was about?"
"I should feel like a king, that's what I should feel like," he
replied indignantly.
"I shouldn't feel like a queen. I should feel MISERABLE."
She sat with her little feet dangling, and her hands folded in her
lap. Her infantile blue eyes held him as the Ancient Mariner had been
held. He could not get away from the clear directness of them. He did
not want to exactly, but she frightened him more and more.
"I should be ashamed," she proceeded. "I should feel as if I had taken
an advantage. What you've got to do is to find out something no one
else can find out for you, Mr. Temple Barholm."
"How can I find it out without you? It was you who put me on to the
wedding-cake; you can put me on to other things."
"Because I've lived in the place," she answered unswervingly. "I know
how funny it is for any one to think of me being Mrs. Temple Barholm.
You don't."
"You bet I don't," he answered; "but I'll tell you what I do know, and
that's how funny it is that I should be Mr. Temple Barholm. I've got
on to that all right, all right. Have you?"
She looked at him with a reflection that said much. She took him in
with a judicial summing up of which it must be owned an added respect
was part. She had always believed he had more sense than most young
men, and now she knew it.
"When a person's clever enough to see things for himself, he's
generally clever enough to manage them," she replied.
He knelt down beside the trunk and took both her hands in his. He held
them fast and rather hard.
"Are you throwing me down for good, Little Ann?" he said. "If you are,
I can't stand it, I won't stand it."
"If you care about me like that, you'll do what I tell you," she
interrupted, and she slipped down from the top of her trunk. "I know
what Mother would say. She'd say, 'Ann, you give that young man a
chance.' And I'm going to give you one. I've said all I'm going to,
Mr. Temple Barholm."
He took both her elbows and looked at her closely, feeling a somewhat
awed conviction.
" I - believe - you have," he said.
And here the sound of Mr. Hutchinson's loud and stertorous breathing
ceased, and he waked up, and came to the door to find out what Ann was
doing.
"What are you two talking about?" he asked. "People think when they
whisper it's not going to disturb anybody, but it's worse than
shouting in a man's ear."
Tembarom walked into the room.
"I've been asking Little Ann to marry me," he announced, "and she
won't."
He sat down in a chair helplessly, and let his head fall into his
hands.
"Eh!" exclaimed Hutchinson. He turned and looked at Ann disturbedly.
"I thought a bit ago tha didn't deny but what tha'd took to him?"
"I didn't, Father," she answered. "I don't change my mind that quick.
I - would have been willing to say 'Yes' when you wouldn't have been
willing to let me. I didn't know he was Mr. Temple Barholm then."
Hutchinson rubbed the back of his head, reddening and rather
bristling.
"Dost tha think th' Temple Barholms would look down on thee?"
"I should look down on myself if I took him up at his first words,
when he's all upset with excitement, and hasn't had time to find out
what things mean. I'm--well, I 'm too fond of him, Father."
Hutchinson gave her a long, steady look.
"You are? " he said.
"Yes, I am."
Tembarom lifted his head, and looked at her, too.
"Are you?" he asked.
She put her hands behind her back, and returned his look with the calm
of ages.
"I'm not going to argue about it," she answered. "Arguing's silly."
His involuntary rising and standing before her was a sort of
unconscious tribute of respect.
"I know that," he owned. "I know you. That's why I take it like this.
But I want you to tell me one thing. If this hadn't happened, if I'd
only had twenty dollars a week, would you have taken me?"
"If you'd had fifteen, and Father could have spared me, I'd have taken
you. Fifteen dollars a week is three pounds two and sixpence, and I've
known curates' wives that had to bring up families on less. It
wouldn't go as far in New York as it would in the country in England,
but we could have made it do--until you got more. I know you, too, Mr.
Temple Barholm."
He turned to her father, and saw in his florid countenance that which
spurred him to bold disclosure.
"Say," he put it to him, as man to man, "she stands there and says a
thing like that, and she expects a fellow not to jerk her into his
arms and squeeze the life out of her! I daren't do it, and I'm not
going to try; but--well, you said her mother was like her, and I guess
you know what I'm up against."
Hutchinson's grunting chuckle contained implications of exultant
tenderness and gratified paternal pride.
"She's th' very spit and image of her mother," he said, "and she had
th' sense of ten women rolled into one, and th' love of twenty. You
let her be, and you're as safe as th' Rock of Ages."
"Do you think I don't know that?" answered Tembarom, his eyes shining
almost to moisture. "But what hits me, by thunder! is that I've lost
the chance of seeing her work out that fifteen-dollar-a-week
proposition, and it drives me crazy."
"I should have downright liked to try it," said Little Ann, with
speculative reflection, and while she knitted her brows in lovely
consideration of the attractive problem, several previously unknown
dimples declared themselves about her mouth.
"Ann," Tembarom ventured, "if I go to Temple Barholm and try it a year
and learn all about it---"
"It would take more than a year," said Ann.
"Don't make it two," Tembarom pleaded. "I'll sit up at night with wet
towels round my head to learn; I'll spend fourteen hours a day with
girls that look like the pictures in the `Ladies' Pictorial', or
whatever it is in England; I'll give them every chance in life, if
you'll let me off afterward. There must be another lost heir
somewhere; let's dig him up and then come back to little old New York
and be happy. Gee! Ann,"--letting himself go and drawing nearer to
her,-- "how happy we could be in one of those little flats in Harlem!"
She was a warm little human thing, and a tender one, and when he came
close to her, glowing with tempestuous boyish eagerness, her eyes grew
bluer because they were suddenly wet, and she was obliged to move
softly back.
"Yes," she said; "I know those little flats. Any one could---" She
stopped herself, because she had been going to reveal. what a home a
woman could make in rooms like the compartments in a workbox. She knew
and saw it all. She drew back a little again, but she put out a hand
and laid it on his sleeve.
"When you've had quite time enough to find out, and know what the
other thing means, I'll do whatever you want me to do," she said. "It
won't matter what it is. I'll do it."
"She means that," Hutchinson mumbled unsteadily, turning aside. "Same
as her mother would have meant it. And she means it in more ways than
one."
And so she did. The promise included quite firmly the possibility of
not unnatural changes in himself such as young ardor could not
foresee, even the possibility of his new life withdrawing him entirely
from the plane on which rapture could materialize on twenty dollars a
week in a flat in Harlem.
CHAPTER IX
Type as exotic as Tembarom's was to his solicitor naturally suggested
problems. Mr. Palford found his charge baffling because, according to
ordinary rules, a young man so rudimentary should have presented no
problems not perfectly easy to explain. It was herein that he was
exotic. Mr. Palford, who was not given to subtle analysis of
differences in character and temperament, argued privately that an
English youth who had been brought up in the streets would have been
one of two or three things. He would have been secretly terrified and
resentful, roughly awkward and resentful, or boastfully delighted and
given to a common youth's excitedly common swagger at finding himself
suddenly a "swell."
This special kind of youth would most assuredly have constantly
thought of himself as a "swell" and would have lost his head
altogether, possibly with results in the matter of conduct in public
which would have been either maddening or crushing to the spirit of a
well-bred, mature-minded legal gentleman temporarily thrust into the
position of bear-leader.
But Tembarom was none of these things. If he was terrified, he did not
reveal his anguish. He was without doubt not resentful, but on the
contrary interested and curious, though he could not be said to bear
himself as one elated. He indulged in no frolics or extravagances. He
saw the Hutchinsons off on their steamer, and supplied them with fruit
and flowers and books with respectful moderation. He did not conduct
himself as a benefactor bestowing unknown luxuries, but as a young man
on whom unexpected luck had bestowed decent opportunities to express
his friendship. In fact, Palford's taste approved of his attitude. He
was evidently much under the spell of the slight girl with the
Manchester accent and sober blue eyes, but she was neither flighty nor
meretricious, and would have sense enough to give no trouble even when
he naturally forgot her in the revelations of his new life. Her father
also was plainly a respectable working-man, with a blunt Lancashire
pride which would keep him from intruding.
"You can't butt in and get fresh with a man like that," Tembarom said.
"Money wouldn't help you. He's too independent."
After the steamer had sailed away it was observable to his solicitor
that Mr. Temple Barholm was apparently occupied every hour. He did not
explain why he seemed to rush from one part of New York to another and
why he seemed to be seeking interviews with persons it was plainly
difficult to get at. He was evidently working hard to accomplish
something or other before he left the United States, perhaps. He asked
some astutely practical business questions; his intention seeming to
be to gain a definite knowledge of what his future resources would be
and of his freedom to use them as he chose.
Once or twice Mr. Palford was rather alarmed by the tendency of his
questions. Had he actually some prodigious American scheme in view? He
seemed too young and inexperienced in the handling of large sums for
such a possibility. But youth and inexperience and suddenly inherited
wealth not infrequently led to rash adventures. Something which
Palford called "very handsome" was done for Mrs. Bowse and the
boarding-house. Mrs. Bowse was evidently not proud enough to resent
being made secure for a few years' rent. The extraordinary page was
provided for after a large amount of effort and expenditure of energy.
"I couldn't leave Galton high and dry," Tembarom explained when he
came in after rushing about. "I think I know a man he might try, but
I've got to find him and put him on to things. Good Lord! nobody
rushed about to find me and offer me the job. I hope this fellow wants
it as bad as I did. He'll be up in the air." He discovered the where-
abouts of the young man in question, and finding him, as the youngster
almost tearfully declared, "about down and out," his proposition was
met with the gratitude the relief from a prospect of something
extremely like starvation would mentally produce. Tembarom took him to
Galton after having talked him over in detail.
"He's had an education, and you know how much I'd had when I butted
into the page," he said. "No one but you would have let me try it. You
did it only because you saw--you saw--"
"Yes, I saw," answered Galton, who knew exactly what he had seen and
who found his up-town social representative and his new situation as
interesting as amusing and just touched with the pathetic element.
Galton was a traveled man and knew England and several other countries
well.
"You saw that a fellow wanted the job as much as I did would be likely
to put up a good fight to hold it down. I was scared out of my life
when I started out that morning of the blizzard, but I couldn't afford
to be scared. I guess soldiers who are scared fight like that when
they see bayonets coming at them. You have to."
"I wonder how often a man finds out that he does pretty big things
when bayonets are coming at him," answered Galton, who was actually
neglecting his work for a few minutes so that he might look at and
talk to him, this New York descendant of Norman lords and Saxon kings.
"Joe Bennett had been trying to live off free-lunch counters for a
week when I found him," Tembarom explained. "You don't know what that
is. He'll go at the page all right. I'm going to take him up-town and
introduce him to my friends there and get them to boost him along."
"You made friends," said Galton. "I knew you would."
"Some of the best ever. Good-natured and open-handed. Well, you bet!
Only trouble was they wanted you to eat and drink everything in sight,
and they didn't quite like it when you couldn't get outside all the
champagne they'd offer you."
He broke into a big, pleased laugh.
"When I went in and told Munsberg he pretty near threw a fit. Of
course he thought I was kidding. But when I made him believe it, he
was as glad as if he'd had luck himself. It was just fine the way
people took it. Tell you what, it takes good luck, or bad luck, to
show you how good-natured a lot of folks are. They'll treat Bennett
and the page all right; you'll see."
"They'll miss you," said Galton.
"I shall miss them," Tembarom answered in a voice with a rather
depressed drop in it.
"I shall miss you," said Galton.
Tembarom's face reddened a little.
"I guess it'd seem rather fresh for me to tell you how I shall miss
you," he said. "I said that first day that I didn't know how to tell
you how I--well, how I felt about you giving a mutt like me that big
chance. You never thought I didn't know how little I did know, did
you?" he inquired almost anxiously.
"That was it--that you did know and that you had the backbone and the
good spirits to go in and win," Galton replied. "I'm a tired man, and
good spirits and good temper seem to me about the biggest assets a man
can bring into a thing. I shouldn't have dared do it when I was your
age. You deserved the Victoria Cross," he added, chuckling.
"What's the Victoria Cross?" asked Tembarom.
"You'll find out when you go to England."
"Well, I'm not supposing that you don't know about how many billion
things I'll have to find out when I go to England."
"There will be several thousand," replied Galton moderately; "but
you'll learn about them as you go on."
"Say," said Tembarom, reflectively, "doesn't it seem queer to think of
a fellow having to keep up his spirits because he's fallen into three
hundred and fifty thousand a year? You wouldn't think he'd have to,
would you?"
"But you find he has?" queried Galton, interestedly.
Tembarom's lifted eyes were so honest that they were touching.
"I don't know where I'm at," he said. "I'm going to wake up in a new
place--like people that die. If you knew what it was like, you
wouldn't mind it so much; but you don't know a blamed thing. It's not
having seen a sample that rattles you."
"You're fond of New York?"
"Good Lord! it's all the place I know on earth, and it's just about
good enough for me, by gee! It's kept me alive when it might have
starved me to death. My! I've had good times here," he added, flushing
with emotion. "Good times-- when I hadn't a whole meal a day!"
"You'd have good times anywhere," commented Galton, also with feeling.
"You carry them over your shoulder, and you share them with a lot of
other people."
He certainly shared some with Joe Bennett, whom he took up-town and
introduced right and left to his friendly patrons, who, excited by the
atmosphere of adventure and prosperity, received him with open arms.
To have been the choice of T. Tembarom as a mere representative of the
EARTH would have been a great thing for Bennett, but to be the choice
of the hero of a romance of wildest opulence was a tremendous send-
off. He was accepted at once, and when Tembarom actually "stood for" a
big farewell supper of his own in "The Hall," and nearly had his hand
shaken off by congratulating acquaintances, the fact that he kept the
new aspirant by his side, so that the waves of high popularity flowed
over him until he sometimes lost his joyful breath, established him as
a sort of hero himself.
Mr. Palford did not know of this festivity, as he also found he was
not told of several other things. This he counted as a feature of his
client's exoticism. His extraordinary lack of concealment of things
vanity forbids many from confessing combined itself with a quite
cheerful power to keep his own counsel when he was, for reasons of his
own, so inclined.
"He can keep his mouth shut, that chap," Hutchinson had said once, and
Mr. Palford remembered it. "Most of us can't. I've got a notion I can;
but I don't many's the time when I should. There's a lot more in him
than you'd think for. He's naught but a lad, but he is na half such a
fool as he looks."
He was neither hesitant nor timid, Mr. Palford observed. In an
entirely unostentatious way he soon realized that his money gave
things into his hands. He knew he could do most things he chose to do,
and that the power to do them rested in these days with himself
without the necessity of detailed explanation or appeal to others, as
in the case, for instance, of this mysterious friend or protege whose
name was Strangeways. Of the history of his acquaintance with him
Palford knew nothing, and that he should choose to burden himself with
a half-witted invalid --in these terms the solicitor described him--
was simply in-explainable. If he had asked for advice or by his manner
left an opening for the offering of it, he would have been most
strongly counseled to take him to a public asylum and leave him there;
but advice on the subject seemed the last thing he desired or
anticipated, and talk about his friend was what he seemed least likely
to indulge in. He made no secret of his intentions, but he frankly
took charge of them as his own special business, and left the rest
alone.
"Say nothing and saw wood," Palford had once been a trifle puzzled by
hearing him remark casually, and he remembered it later, as he
remembered the comments of Joseph Hutchinson. Tembarom had explained
himself to Little Ann.
"You'll understand," he said. " It is like this. I guess I feel like
you do when a dog or a cat in big trouble just looks at you as if you
were all they had, and they know if you don't stick by them they'll be
killed, and it just drives them crazy. It's the way they look at you
that you can't stand. I believe something would burst in that fellow's
brain if I left him. When he found out I was going to do it he'd just
let out some awful kind of a yell I'd remember till I died. I dried
right up almost as soon as I spoke of him to Palford. He couldn't see
anything but that he was crazy and ought to be put in an asylum. Well,
he's not. There're times when he talks to me almost sensible; only
he's always so awful low down in his mind you're afraid to let him go
on. And he's a little bit better than he was. It seems queer to get to
like a man that's sort of dotty, but I tell you, Ann, because you'll
understand --I've got to sort of like him, and want to see if I can
work it out for him somehow. England seems to sort of stick in his
mind. If I can't spend my money in living the way I want to live,--
buying jewelry and clothes for the girl I'd like to see dressed like a
queen--I'm going to do this just to please myself. I'm going to take
him to England and keep him quiet and see what'll happen. Those big
doctors ought to know about all there is to know, and I can pay them
any old thing they want. By jings! isn't it the limit--to sit here and
say that and know it's true!"
Beyond the explaining of necessary detail to him and piloting him to
England, Mr. Palford did not hold himself many degrees responsible.
His theory of correct conduct assumed no form of altruism. He had
formulated it even before he reached middle age. One of his fixed
rules was to avoid the error of allowing sympathy or sentiment to
hamper him with any unnecessary burden. Natural tendency of
temperament had placed no obstacles in the way of his keeping this
rule. To burden himself with the instruction or modification of this
unfortunately hopeless young New Yorker would be unnecessary.
Palford's summing up of him was that he was of a type with which
nothing palliative could be done. There he was. As unavoidable
circumstances forced one to take him,--commonness, slanginess,
appalling ignorance, and all,--one could not leave him. Fortunately,
no respectable legal firm need hold itself sponsor for a "next of kin"
provided by fate and the wilds of America.
The Temple Barholm estate had never, in Mr. Palford's generation, been
specially agreeable to deal with. The late Mr. Temple Temple Barholm
had been a client of eccentric and abominable temper. Interviews with
him had been avoided as much as possible. His domineering insolence of
bearing had at times been on the verge of precipitating unheard-of
actions, because it was almost more than gentlemanly legal flesh and
blood could bear. And now appeared this young man.
He rushed about New York strenuously attending to business concerning
himself and his extraordinary acquaintances, and on the day of the
steamer's sailing he presented himself at the last moment in an
obviously just purchased suit of horribly cut clothes. At all events,
their cut was horrible in the eyes of Mr. Palford, who accepted no cut
but that of a West End tailor. They were badly made things enough,
because they were unconsidered garments that Tembarom had barely found
time to snatch from a "ready-made" counter at the last moment. He had
been too much "rushed" by other things to remember that he must have
them until almost too late to get them at all. He bought them merely
because they were clothes, and warm enough to make a voyage in. He
possessed a monster ulster, in which, to Mr. Palford's mind, he looked
like a flashy black-leg. He did not know it was flashy. His
opportunities for cultivating a refined taste in the matter of
wardrobe had been limited, and he had wasted no time in fastidious
consideration or regrets. Palford did him some injustice in taking it
for granted that his choice of costume was the result of deliberate
bad taste. It was really not choice at all. He neither liked his
clothes nor disliked them. He had been told he needed warm garments,
and he had accepted the advice of the first salesman who took charge
of him when he dropped into the big department store he was most
familiar with because it was the cheapest in town. Even when it was no
longer necessary to be cheap, it was time-saving and easy to go into a
place one knew.
The fact that he was as he was, and that they were the subjects of
comment and objects of unabated interest through-out the voyage, that
it was proper that they should be companions at table and on deck,
filled Mr. Palford with annoyed unease.
Of course every one on board was familiar with the story of the
discovery of the lost heir. The newspapers had reveled in it, and had
woven romances about it which might well have caused the deceased Mr.
Temple Barholm to turn in his grave. After the first day Tembarom had
been picked out from among the less-exciting passengers, and when he
walked the deck, books were lowered into laps or eyes followed him
over their edges. His steamer-chair being placed in a prominent
position next to that of a pretty, effusive Southern woman, the mother
of three daughters whose eyes and eyelashes attracted attention at the
distance of a deck's length, he was without undue delay provided with
acquaintances who were prepared to fill his every moment with
entertainment.
"The three Gazelles," as their mother playfully confided to Tembarom
her daughters were called in Charleston, were destructively lovely.
They were swaying reeds of grace, and being in radiant spirits at the
prospect of "going to Europe," were companions to lure a man to any
desperate lengths. They laughed incessantly, as though they were
chimes of silver bells; they had magnolia-petal skins which neither
wind nor sun blemished; they had nice young manners, and soft moods in
which their gazelle eyes melted and glowed and their long lashes
drooped. They could dance, they played on guitars, and they sang. They
were as adorable as they were lovely and gay.
"If a fellow was going to fall in love," Tembarom said to Palford,
"there'd be no way out of this for him unless he climbed the rigging
and dragged his food up in a basket till he got to Liverpool. If he
didn't go crazy about Irene, he'd wake up raving about Honora; and if
he got away from Honora, Adelia Louise would have him `down on the
mat.'" From which Mr. Palford argued that the impression made by the
little Miss Hutchinson with the Manchester accent had not yet had time
to obliterate itself.
The Gazelles were of generous Southern spirit, and did not surround
their prize with any barrier of precautions against other young
persons of charm. They introduced him to one girl after another, and
in a day or two he was the center of animated circles whenever he
appeard. The singular thing, however, was that he did not appear as
often as the other men who were on board. He seemed to stay a great
deal with Strangeways, who shared his suite of rooms and never came on
deck. Sometimes the Gazelles prettily reproached him. Adelia Louise
suggested to the others that his lack of advantages in the past had
made him feel rather awkward and embarrassed; but Palford knew he was
not embarrassed. He accepted his own limitations too simply to be
disturbed by them. Palford would have been extremely bored by him if
he had been of the type of young outsider who is anxiouus about
himself and expansive in self-revelation and appeals for advice; but
sometimes Tembarom's air of frankness, which was really the least
expansive thing in the world and revealed nothing whatever, besides
concealing everything it chose, made him feel himself almost
irritatingly baffled. It would have been more natural if he had not
been able to keep anything to himself and had really talked too much.
CHAPTER X
The necessary business in London having been transacted, Tembarom went
north to take possession of the home of his forefathers. It had rained
for two days before he left London, and it rained steadily all the way
to Lancashire, and was raining steadily when he reached Temple
Barholm. He had never seen such rain before. It was the quiet, unmoved
persistence of it which amazed him. As he sat in the railroad carriage
and watched the slanting lines of its unabating downpour, he felt that
Mr. Palford must inevitably make some remark upon it. But Mr. Palford
continued to read his newspapers undisturbedly, as though the
condition of atmosphere surrounding him were entirely accustomed and
natural. It was of course necessary and proper that he should
accompany his client to his destination, but the circumstances of the
case made the whole situation quite abnormal. Throughout the centuries
each Temple Barholm had succeeded to his estate in a natural and
conventional manner. He had either been welcomed or resented by his
neighbors, his tenants, and his family, and proper and fitting
ceremonies had been observed. But here was an heir whom nobody knew,
whose very existence nobody had even suspected, a young man who had
been an outcast in the streets of the huge American city of which
lurid descriptions are given. Even in New York he could have produced
no circle other than Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and the objects of
interest to the up-town page, so he brought no one with him; for
Strangeways seemed to have been mysteriously disposed of after their
arrival in London.
Never had Palford & Grimby on their hands a client who seemed so
entirely alone. What, Mr. Palford asked himself, would he do in the
enormity of Temple Barholm, which always struck one as being a place
almost without limit. But that, after all, was neither here nor there.
There he was. You cannot undertake to provide a man with relatives if
he has none, or with acquaintances if people do not want to know him.
His past having been so extraordinary, the neighborhood would
naturally be rather shy of him. At first, through mere force of custom
and respect for an old name, punctilious, if somewhat alarmed,
politeness would be shown by most people; but after the first calls
all would depend upon how much people could stand of the man himself.
The aspect of the country on a wet winter's day was not enlivening.
The leafless and dripping hedges looked like bundles of sticks; the
huge trees, which in June would be majestic bowers of greenery, now
held out great skeleton arms, which seemed to menace both earth and
sky. Heavy-faced laborers tramped along muddy lanes; cottages with
soaked bits of dead gardens looked like hovels; big, melancholy cart-
horses, dragging jolting carts along the country roads, hung their
heads as they splashed through the mire.
As Tembarom had known few persons who had ever been out of America, he
had not heard that England was beautiful, and he saw nothing which led
him to suspect its charms. London had impressed him as gloomy, dirty,
and behind the times despite its pretensions; the country struck him
as "the limit." Hully gee! was he going to be expected to spend his
life in this! Should he be obliged to spend his life in it. He'd find
that out pretty quick, and then, if there was no hard-and-fast law
against it, him for little old New York again, if he had to give up
the whole thing and live on ten per. If he had been a certain kind of
youth, his discontent would have got the better of him, and he might
have talked a good deal to Mr. Palford and said many disparaging
things.
"But the man was born here," he reflected. "I guess he doesn't know
anything else, and thinks it's all right. I've heard of English
fellows who didn't like New York. He looks like that kind."
He had supplied himself with newspapers and tried to read them. Their
contents were as unexciting as the rain-sodden landscape. There were
no head-lines likely to arrest any man's attention. There was a lot
about Parliament and the Court, and one of them had a column or two
about what lords and ladies were doing, a sort of English up-town or
down-town page.
He knew the stuff, but there was no snap in it, and there were no
photographs or descriptions of dresses. Galton would have turned it
down. He could never have made good if he had done no better than
that. He grinned to himself when he read that the king had taken a
drive and that a baby prince had the measles.
"I wonder what they'd think of the Sunday Earth," he mentally
inquired.
He would have been much at sea if he had discovered what they really
would have thought of it. They passed through smoke-vomiting
manufacturing towns, where he saw many legs seemingly bearing about
umbrellas, but few entire people; they whizzed smoothly past drenched
suburbs, wet woodlands, and endless-looking brown moors, covered with
dead bracken and bare and prickly gorse. He thought these last great
desolate stretches worse than all the rest.
But the railroad carriage was luxuriously upholstered and comfortable,
though one could not walk about and stretch his legs. In the
afternoon, Mr. Palford ordered in tea, and plainly expected him to
drink two cups and eat thin bread and butter. He felt inclined to
laugh, though the tea was all right, and so was the bread and butter,
and he did not fail his companion in any respect. The inclination to
laugh was aroused by the thought of what Jim Bowles and Julius would
say if they could see old T. T. with nothing to do at 4:30 but put in
cream and sugar, as though he were at a tea-party on Fifth Avenue.
But, gee! this rain did give him the Willies. If he was going to be
sorry for himself, he might begin right now. But he wasn't. He was
going to see this thing through.
The train had been continuing its smooth whir through fields, wooded
lands, and queer, dead-and-alive little villages for some time before
it drew up at last at a small station. Bereft by the season of its
garden bloom and green creepers, it looked a bare and uninviting
little place. On the two benches against the wall of the platform a
number of women sat huddled together in the dampness. Several of them
held children in their laps and all stared very hard, nudging one
another as he descended from the train. A number of rustics stood
about the platform, giving it a somewhat crowded air. It struck
Tembarom that, for an out- of-the-way place, there seemed to be a good
many travelers, and he wondered if they could all be going away. He
did not know that they were the curious element among such as lived in
the immediate neighborhood of the station and had come out merely to
see him on his first appearance. Several of them touched their hats as
he went by, and he supposed they knew Palford and were saluting him.
Each of them was curious, but no one was in a particularly welcoming
mood. There was, indeed, no reason for anticipating enthusiasm. It
was, however, but human nature that the bucolic mind should bestir
itself a little in the desire to obtain a view of a Temple Barholm who
had earned his living by blacking boots and selling newspapers,
unknowing that he was "one o' th' gentry."
When he stepped from his first-class carriage, Tembarom found himself
confronted by a very straight, clean-faced, and well-built young man,
who wore a long, fawn-colored livery coat with claret facings and
silver buttons. He touched his cockaded hat, and at once took up the
Gladstone bags. Tembarom knew that he was a footman because he had
seen something like him outside restaurants, theaters, and shops in
New York, but he was not sure whether he ought to touch his own hat or
not. He slightly lifted it from his head to show there was no ill
feeling, and then followed him and Mr. Palford to the carriage waiting
for them. It was a severe but sumptuous equipage, and the coachman was
as well dressed and well built as the footman. Tembarom took his place
in it with many mental reservations.
"What are the illustrations on the doors?" he inquired.
"The Temple Barholm coat of arms," Mr. Palford answered. "The people
at the station are your tenants. Members of the family of the stout
man with the broad hat have lived as yeoman farmers on your land for
three hundred years."
They went on their way, with more rain, more rain, more dripping
hedges, more soaked fields, and more bare, huge-armed trees. CLOP,
CLOP, CLOP, sounded the horses' hoofs along the road, and from his
corner of the carriage Mr. Palford tried to make polite conversation.
Faces peered out of the windows of the cottages, sometimes a whole
family group of faces, all crowded together, eager to look, from the
mother with a baby in her arms to the old man or woman, plainly
grandfather or grandmother--sharp, childishly round, or bleared old
eyes, all excited and anxious to catch glimpses.
"They are very curious to see you," said Mr. Palford. "Those two
laborers are touching their hats to you. It will be as well to
recognize their salute."
At a number of the cottage doors the group stood upon the threshold
and touched foreheads or curtsied. Tembarom saluted again and again,
and more than once his friendly grin showed itself. It made him feel
queer to drive along, turning from side to side to acknowledge
obeisances, as he had seen a well-known military hero acknowledge them
as he drove down Broadway.
The chief street of the village of Temple Barholm wandered almost
within hailing distance of the great entrance to the park. The gates
were supported by massive pillars, on which crouched huge stone
griffins. Tembarom felt that they stared savagely over his head as he
was driven toward them as for inspection, and in disdainful silence
allowed to pass between them as they stood on guard, apparently with
the haughtiest mental reservations.
The park through which the long avenue rolled concealed its beauty to
the unaccustomed eye, showing only more bare trees and sodden
stretches of brown grass. The house itself, as it loomed up out of the
thickening rain-mist, appalled Tembarom by its size and gloomily gray
massiveness. Before it was spread a broad terrace of stone, guarded by
more griffins of even more disdainful aspect than those watching over
the gates. The stone noses held themselves rigidly in the air as the
reporter of the up-town society page passed with Mr. Palford up a
flight of steps broad enough to make him feel as though he were going
to church. Footmen with powdered heads received him at the carriage
door, seemed to assist him to move, to put one foot before the other
for him, to stand in rows as though they were a military guard ready
to take him into custody.
Then he was inside, standing in an enormous hall filled with
furnishings such as he had never seen or heard of before. Carved oak,
suits of armor, stone urns, portraits, another flight of church steps
mounting upward to surrounding galleries, stained-glass windows,
tigers' and lions' heads, horns of tremendous size, strange and
beautiful weapons, suggested to him that the dream he had been living
in for weeks had never before been so much a dream. He had walked
about as in a vision, but among familiar surroundings. Mrs. Bowse's
boarders and his hall bedroom had helped him to retain some hold over
actual existence. But here the reverently saluting villagers staring
at him through windows as though he were General Grant, the huge,
stone entrance, the drive of what seemed to be ten miles through the
park, the gloomy mass of architecture looming up, the regiment of
liveried men-servants, with respectfully lowered but excitedly curious
eyes, the dark and solemn richness inclosing and claiming him--all
this created an atmosphere wholly unreal. As he had not known books,
its parallel had not been suggested to him by literature. He had
literally not heard that such things existed. Selling newspapers and
giving every moment to the struggle for life or living, one did not
come within the range of splendors. He had indeed awakened in that
other world of which he had spoken. And though he had heard that there
was another world, he had had neither time nor opportunity to make
mental pictures of it. His life so far had expressed itself in another
language of figures. The fact that he had in his veins the blood of
the Norman lords and Saxon kings may or may not have had something to
do with the fact that he was not abashed, but bewildered. The same
factor may or may not have aided him to preserve a certain stoic,
outward composure. Who knows what remote influences express themselves
in common acts of modern common life? As Cassivellaunus observed his
surroundings as he followed in captive chains his conqueror's
triumphal car through the streets of Rome, so the keen-eyed product of
New York pavement life "took in" all about him. Existence had forced
upon him the habit of sharp observance. The fundamental working law of
things had expressed itself in the simple colloquialism, "Keep your
eye skinned, and don't give yourself away." In what phrases the
parallel of this concise advice formulated itself in 55 B.C. no
classic has yet exactly informed us, but doubtless something like it
was said in ancient Rome. Tembarom did not give himself away, and he
took rapid, if uncertain, inventory of people and things. He remarked,
for instance, that Palford's manner of speaking to a servant was
totally different from the manner he used in addressing himself. It
was courteous, but remote, as though he spoke across an accepted chasm
to beings of another race. There was no hint of incivility in it, but
also no hint of any possibility that it could occur to the person
addressed to hesitate or resent. It was a subtle thing, and Tembarom
wondered how he did it.
They were shown into a room the walls of which seemed built of books;
the furniture was rich and grave and luxuriously comfortable. A fire
blazed as well as glowed in a fine chimney, and a table near it was
set with a glitter of splendid silver urn and equipage for tea.
"Mrs. Butterworth was afraid you might not have been able to get tea,
sir," said the man-servant, who did not wear livery, but whose
butler's air of established authority was more impressive than any
fawn color and claret enriched with silver could have encompassed.
Tea again? Perhaps one was obliged to drink it at regular intervals.
Tembarom for a moment did not awaken to the fact that the man was
speaking to him, as the master from whom orders came. He glanced at
Mr. Palford.
"Mr. Temple Barholm had tea after we left Crowly," Mr. Palford said.
"He will no doubt wish to go to his room at once, Burrill."
"Yes, sir," said Burrill, with that note of entire absence of comment
with which Tembarom later became familiar. "Pearson is waiting."
It was not unnatural to wonder who Pearson was and why he was waiting,
but Tembarom knew he would find out. There was a slight relief on
realizing that tea was not imperative. He and Mr. Palford were led
through the hall again. The carriage had rolled away, and two footmen,
who were talking confidentially together, at once stood at attention.
The staircase was more imposing as one mounted it than it appeared as
one looked at it from below. Its breadth made Tembarom wish to lay a
hand on a balustrade, which seemed a mile away. He had never
particularly wished to touch balustrades before. At the head of the
first flight hung an enormous piece of tapestry, its forest and
hunters and falconers awakening Tembarom's curiosity, as it looked
wholly unlike any picture he had ever seen in a shop-window. There
were pictures everywhere, and none of them looked like chromos. Most
of the people in the portraits were in fancy dress. Rumors of a New
York millionaire ball had given him some vague idea of fancy dress. A
lot of them looked like freaks. He caught glimpses of corridors
lighted by curious, high, deep windows with leaded panes. It struck
him that there was no end to the place, and that there must be rooms
enough in it for a hotel.
"The tapestry chamber, of course, Burrill," he heard Mr. Palford say
in a low tone.
"Yes, sir. Mr. Temple Barholm always used it."
A few yards farther on a door stood open, revealing an immense room,
rich and gloomy with tapestry-covered walls and dark oak furniture. A
bed which looked to Tembarom incredibly big, with its carved oak
canopy and massive posts, had a presiding personality of its own. It
was mounted by steps, and its hangings and coverlid were of embossed
velvet, time-softened to the perfection of purples and blues. A fire
enriched the color of everything, and did its best to drive the
shadows away. Deep windows opened either into the leafless boughs of
close-growing trees or upon outspread spaces of heavily timbered park,
where gaunt, though magnificent, bare branches menaced and defied. A
slim, neat young man, with a rather pale face and a touch of anxiety
in his expression, came forward at once.
"This is Pearson, who will valet you," exclaimed Mr. Palford.
"Thank you, sir," said Pearson in a low, respectful voice. His manner
was correctness itself.
There seemed to Mr. Palford to be really nothing else to say. He
wanted, in fact, to get to his own apartment and have a hot bath and a
rest before dinner.
"Where am I, Burrill?" he inquired as he turned to go down the
corridor.
"The crimson room, sir," answered Burrill, and he closed the door of
the tapestry chamber and shut Tembarom in alone with Pearson.
CHAPTER XI
For a few moments the two young men looked at each other, Pearson's
gaze being one of respectfulness which hoped to propitiate, if
propitiation was necessary, though Pearson greatly trusted it was not.
Tembarom's was the gaze of hasty investigation and inquiry. He
suddenly thought that it would have been "all to the merry" if
somebody had "put him on to" a sort of idea of what was done to a
fellow when he was "valeted." A valet, he had of course gathered,
waited on one somehow and looked after one's clothes. But were there
by chance other things he expected to do,--manicure one's nails or cut
one's hair,--and how often did he do it, and was this the day? He was
evidently there to do something, or he wouldn't have been waiting
behind the door to pounce out the minute he appeared, and when the
other two went away, Burrill wouldn't have closed the door as solemnly
as though he shut the pair of them in together to get through some
sort of performance.
"Here's where T. T. begins to feel like a fool," he thought. "And
here's where there's no way out of looking like one. I don't know a
thing."
But personal vanity was not so strong in him as healthy and normal
good temper. Despite the fact that the neat correctness of Pearson's
style and the finished expression of his neat face suggested that he
was of a class which knew with the most finished exactness all that
custom and propriety demanded on any occasion on which "valeting" in
its most occult branches might be done, he was only "another fellow,"
after all, and must be human. So Tembarom smiled at him.
"Hello, Pearson," he said. "How are you?"
Pearson slightly started. It was the tiniest possible start, quite
involuntary, from which he recovered instantly, to reply in a tone of
respectful gratefulness:
"Thank you, sir, very well; thank you, sir."
"That's all right," answered Tembarom, a sense of relief because he'd
"got started" increasing the friendliness of his smile. "I see you got
my trunk open," he said, glancing at some articles of clothing neatly
arranged upon the bed.
Pearson was slightly alarmed. It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps
it was not the custom in America to open a gentleman's box and lay out
his clothes for him. For special reasons he was desperately anxious to
keep his place, and above all things he felt he must avoid giving
offense by doing things which, by being too English, might seem to
cast shades of doubt on the entire correctness of the customs of
America. He had known ill feeling to arise between "gentlemen's
gentlemen" in the servants' hall in the case of slight differences in
customs, contested with a bitterness of feeling which had made them
almost an international question. There had naturally been a great
deal of talk about the new Mr. Temple Barholm and what might be
expected of him. When a gentleman was not a gentleman,--this was the
form of expression in "the hall,"--the Lord only knew what would
happen. And this one, who had, for all one knew, been born in a
workhouse, and had been a boot-black kicked about in American
streets,--they did not know Tembarom,--and nearly starved to death,
and found at last in a low lodging-house, what could he know about
decent living? And ten to one he'd be American enough to swagger and
bluster and pretend he knew everything better than any one else, and
lose his temper frightfully when he made mistakes, and try to make
other people seem to blame. Set a beggar on horseback, and who didn't
know what he was? There were chances enough and to spare that not one
of them would be able to stand it, and that in a month's time they
would all be looking for new places.
So while Tembarom was rather afraid of Pearson and moved about in an
awful state of uncertainty, Pearson was horribly afraid of Tembarom,
and was, in fact, in such a condition of nervous anxiety that he was
obliged more than once furtively to apply to his damp, pale young
forehead his exceedingly fresh and spotless pocket-handkerchief.
In the first place, there was the wardrobe. What COULD he do? How
could he approach the subject with sufficient delicacy? Mr. Temple
Barholm had brought with him only a steamer trunk and a Gladstone bag,
the latter evidently bought in London, to be stuffed with hastily
purchased handkerchiefs and shirts, worn as they came out of the shop,
and as evidently bought without the slightest idea of the kind of
linen a gentleman should own. What most terrified Pearson, who was of
a timid and most delicate-minded nature, was that having the workhouse
and the boot-blacking as a background, the new Mr. Temple Barholm
COULDN'T know, as all this had come upon him so suddenly. And was it
to be Pearson's calamitous duty to explain to him that he had NOTHING,
that he apparently KNEW nothing, and that as he had no friends who
knew, a mere common servant must educate him, if he did not wish to
see him derided and looked down upon and actually "cut" by gentlemen
that WERE gentlemen? All this to say nothing of Pearson's own well-
earned reputation for knowledge of custom, intelligence, and deftness
in turning out the objects of his care in such form as to be a
reference in themselves when a new place was wanted. Of course
sometimes there were even real gentlemen who were most careless and
indifferent to appearance, and who, if left to themselves, would buy
garments which made the blood run cold when one realized that his own
character and hopes for the future often depended upon his latest
employer's outward aspect. But the ulster in which Mr. Temple Barholm
had presented himself was of a cut and material such as Pearson's most
discouraged moments had never forced him to contemplate. The limited
wardrobe in the steamer trunk was all new and all equally bad. There
was no evening dress, no proper linen,--not what Pearson called
"proper,"-- no proper toilet appurtenances. What was Pearson called
upon by duty to do? If he had only had the initiative to anticipate
this, he might have asked permission to consult in darkest secrecy
with Mr. Palford. But he had never dreamed of such a situation, and
apparently he would be obliged to send his new charge down to his
first dinner in the majestically decorous dining-room, "before all the
servants," in a sort of speckled tweed cutaway, with a brown necktie.
Tembarom, realizing without delay that Pearson did not expect to be
talked to and being cheered by the sight of the fire, sat down before
it in an easy-chair the like of which for luxurious comfort he had
never known. He was, in fact, waiting for developments. Pearson would
say or do something shortly which would give him a chance to "catch
on," or perhaps he'd go out of the room and leave him to himself,
which would be a thing to thank God for. Then he could wash his face
and hands, brush his hair, and wait till the dinner-bell rang. They'd
be likely to have one. They'd have to in a place like this.
But Pearson did not go out of the room. He moved about behind him for
a short time with footfall so almost entirely soundless that Tembarom
became aware that, if it went on long, he should be nervous; in fact,
he was nervous already. He wanted to know what he was doing. He could
scarcely resist the temptation to turn his head and look; but he did
not want to give himself away more entirely than was unavoidable, and,
besides, instinct told him that he might frighten Pearson, who looked
frightened enough, in a neat and well-mannered way, already. Hully
gee! how he wished he would go out of the room!
But he did not. There were gently gliding footsteps of Pearson behind
him, quiet movements which would have seemed stealthy if they had been
a burglar's, soft removals of articles from one part of the room to
another, delicate brushings, and almost noiseless foldings. Now
Pearson was near the bed, now he had opened a wardrobe, now he was
looking into the steamer trunk, now he had stopped somewhere behind
him, within a few yards of his chair. Why had he ceased moving? What
was he looking at? What kept him quiet?
Tembarom expected him to begin stirring mysteriously again; but he did
not. Why did he not? There reigned in the room entire silence; no soft
footfalls, no brushing, no folding. Was he doing nothing? Had he got
hold of something which had given him a fit? There had been no sound
of a fall; but perhaps even if an English valet had a fit, he'd have
it so quietly and respectfully that one wouldn't hear it. Tembarom
felt that he must be looking at the back of his head, and he wondered
what was the matter with it. Was his hair cut in a way so un-English
that it had paralyzed him? The back of his head began to creep under
an investigation so prolonged. No sound at all, no movement. Tembarom
stealthily took out his watch--good old Waterbury he wasn't going to
part with --and began to watch the minute-hand. If nothing happened in
three minutes he was going to turn round. One--two-- three--and the
silence made it seem fifteen. He returned his Waterbury to his pocket
and turned round.
Pearson was not dead. He was standing quite still and resigned,
waiting. It was his business to wait, not to intrude or disturb, and
having put everything in order and done all he could do, he was
waiting for further commands--in some suspense, it must be admitted.
"Hello!" exclaimed Tembarom, involuntarily.
"Shall I get your bath ready, sir?" inquired Pearson. "Do you like it
hot or cold, sir?"
Tembarom drew a relieved breath. He hadn't dropped dead and he hadn't
had a fit, and here was one of the things a man did when he valeted
you--he got your bath ready. A hasty recollection of the much-used,
paint-smeared tin bath on the fourth floor of Mrs. Bowse's boarding-
house sprang up before him. Everybody had to use it in turn, and you
waited hours for the chance to make a dash into it. No one stood still
and waited fifteen minutes until you got good and ready to tell him he
could go and turn on the water. Gee whizz!
Being relieved himself, he relieved Pearson by telling him he might
"fix it" for him, and that he would have hot water.
"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir," said Pearson, and silently left the
room.
Then Tembarom got up from his chair and began to walk about rather
restlessly. A new alarm seized him. Did Pearson expect to WASH him or
to stand round and hand him soap and towels and things while he washed
himself?
If it was supposed that you hadn't the strength to turn the faucets
yourself, it might be supposed you didn't have the energy to use a
flesh-brush and towels. Did valeting include a kind of shampoo all
over?
"I couldn't stand for that," he said. "I'd have to tell him there'd
been no Turkish baths in mine, and I'm not trained up to them. When
I've got on to this kind of thing a bit more, I'll make him understand
what I'm NOT in for; but I don't want to scare the life out of him
right off. He looks like a good little fellow."
But Pearson's duties as valet did not apparently include giving him
his bath by sheer physical force. He was deft, calm, amenable. He led
Tembarom down the corridor to the bath-room, revealed to him stores of
sumptuous bath-robes and towels, hot- and cold-water faucets, sprays,
and tonic essences. He forgot nothing and, having prepared all, mutely
vanished, and returned to the bedroom to wait--and gaze in troubled
wonder at the speckled tweed cutaway. There was an appalling
possibility--he was aware that he was entirely ignorant of American
customs--that tweed was the fashionable home evening wear in the
States. Tembarom, returning from his bath much refreshed after a warm
plunge and a cold shower, evidently felt that as a costume it was all
that could be desired.
"Will you wear--these, sir,--this evening?" Pearson suggested.
It was suggestive of more than actual inquiry. If he had dared to hope
that his manner might suggest a number of things! For instance, that
in England gentlemen really didn't wear tweed in the evening even in
private. That through some unforeseen circumstances his employer's
evening-dress suit had been delayed, but would of course arrive to-
morrow!
But Tembarom, physically stimulated by hot and cold water, and relief
at being left alone, was beginning to recover his natural buoyancy.
"Yes, I'll wear 'em," he answered, snatching at his hairbrush and
beginning to brush his damp hair. It was a wooden-backed brush that
Pearson had found in his Gladstone bag and shudderingly laid in
readiness on the dressing-table. "I guess they're all right, ain't
they?"
"Oh, quite right, sir, quite," Pearson ventured--"for morning wear."
"Morning?" said Tembarom, brushing vigorously. "Not night?"
"Black, sir," most delicately hinted Pearson, "is--more usual--in the
evening--in England." After which he added, "So to speak," with a
vague hope that the mollifying phrase might counteract the effect of
any apparently implied aspersion on colors preferred in America.
Tembarom ceased brushing his hair, and looked at him in good-natured
desire for information.
"Frock-coats or claw-hammer?" he asked. Despite his natural anxiety,
and in the midst of it, Pearson could not but admit that he had an
uncondemnatory voice and a sort of young way with him which gave one
courage. But he was not quite sure of "claw-hammer."
"Frock-coats for morning dress and afternoon wear, sir," he ventured.
"The evening cut, as you know, is--"
"Claw-hammer. Swallow-tail, I guess you say here," Tembarom ended for
him, quite without hint of rancor, he was rejoiced to see.
"Yes, sir," said Pearson.
The ceremony of dressing proved a fearsome thing as it went on.
Pearson moved about deftly and essayed to do things for the new Mr.
Temple Barholm which the new Mr. Temple Barholm had never heard of a
man not doing for himself. He reached for things Pearson was about to
hand to him or hold for him. He unceremoniously achieved services for
himself which it was part of Pearson's manifest duty to perform. They
got into each other's way; there was even danger sometimes of their
seeming to snatch things from each other, to Pearson's unbounded
horror. Mr. Temple Barholm did not express any irritation whatsoever
misunderstandings took place, but he held his mouth rather close-shut,
and Pearson, not aware that he did this as a precaution against open
grinning or shouts of laughter as he found himself unable to adjust
himself to his attendant's movements, thought it possible that he was
secretly annoyed and regarded the whole matter with disfavor. But when
the dressing was at an end and he stood ready to go down in all his
innocent ignoring of speckled tweed and brown necktie, he looked
neither flurried nor out of humor, and he asked a question in a voice
which was actually friendly. It was a question dealing with an
incident which had aroused much interest in the servants' hall as
suggesting a touch of mystery.
"Mr. Strangeways came yesterday all right, didn't he?" he inquired.
"Yes, sir," Pearson answered. "Mr. Hutchinson and his daughter came
with him. They call her `Little Ann Hutchinson.' She's a sensible
little thing, sir, and she seemed to know exactly what you'd want done
to make him comfortable. Mrs. Butterworth put him in the west room,
sir, and I valeted him. He was not very well when he came, but he
seems better to-day, sir, only he's very anxious to see you."
"That's all right," said Tembarom. "You show me his room. I'll go and
see him now."
And being led by Pearson, he went without delay.
CHAPTER XII
The chief objection to Temple Barholm in Tembarom's mind was that it
was too big for any human use. That at least was how it struck him.
The entrance was too big, the stairs were too wide, the rooms too
broad and too long and too high to allow of eyes accustomed to hall
bedrooms adjusting their vision without discomfort. The dining-room in
which the new owner took his first meal in company with Mr. Palford,
and attended by the large, serious man who wore no livery and three
tall footmen who did, was of a size and stateliness which made him
feel homesick for Mrs. Bowse's dining-room, with its two hurried,
incompetent, and often-changed waitresses and its prevailing friendly
custom of pushing things across the table to save time. Meals were
quickly disposed of at Mrs. Bowse's. Everybody was due up-town or
down-town, and regarded food as an unavoidable, because necessary,
interference with more urgent business. At Temple Barholm one sat half
the night-- this was the impression made upon Tembarom--watching
things being brought in and taken out of the room, carved on a huge
buffet, and passed from one man to another; and when they were brought
solemnly to you, if you turned them down, it seemed that the whole
ceremony had to be gone through with again. All sorts of silver
knives, forks, and spoons were given to one and taken away, and half a
dozen sorts of glasses stood by your plate; and if you made a move to
do anything for yourself, the man out of livery stopped you as though
you were too big a fool to be trusted. The food was all right, but
when you knew what anything was, and were inclined to welcome it as an
old friend, it was given to you in some way that made you get rattled.
With all the swell dishes, you had no butter-plate, and ice seemed
scarce, and the dead, still way the servants moved about gave you a
sort of feeling that you were at a funeral and that it wasn't decent
to talk so long as the remains were in the room. The head-man and the
foot-men seemed to get on by signs, though Tembarom never saw them
making any; and their faces never changed for a moment. Once or twice
he tried a joke, addressing it to Mr. Palford, to see what would
happen. But as Mr. Palford did not seem to see the humor of it, and
gave him the "glassy eye," and neither the head-man nor the footmen
seemed to hear it, he thought that perhaps they didn't know it was a
joke; and if they didn't, and they thought anything at all, they must
think he was dippy. The dinner was a deadly, though sumptuous, meal,
and long drawn out, when measured by meals at Mrs. Bowse's. He did not
know, as Mr. Palford did, that it was perfect, and served with a
finished dexterity that was also perfection.
Mr. Palford, however, was himself relieved when it was at an end. He
had sat at dinner with the late Mr. Temple Barholm in his day, and had
seen him also served by the owners of impassive countenances; but he
had been aware that whatsoever of secret dislike and resentment was
concealed by them, there lay behind their immovability an acceptance
of the fact that he represented, even in his most objectionable
humors, centuries of accustomedness to respectful service and of
knowledge of his right and power to claim it. The solicitor was keenly
aware of the silent comments being made upon the tweed suit and brown
necktie and on the manner in which their wearer boldly chose the wrong
fork or erroneously made use of a knife or spoon. Later in the
evening, in the servants' hall, the comment would not be silent, and
there could be no doubt of what its character would be. There would be
laughter and the relating of incidents. Housemaids and still-room
maids would giggle, and kitchen-maids and boot-boys would grin and
whisper in servile tribute to the witticisms of the superior servants.
After dinner the rest of the evening could at least be spent in talk
about business matters. There still remained details to be enlarged
upon before Palford himself returned to Lincoln's Inn and left Mr.
Temple Barholm to the care of the steward of his estate. It was not
difficult to talk to him when the sole subject of conversation was of
a business nature.
Before they parted for the night the mystery of the arrangements made
for Strangeways had been cleared. In fact, Mr. Temple Barholm made no
mystery of them. He did not seem ignorant of the fact that what he had
chosen to do was unusual, but he did not appear hampered or
embarrassed by the knowledge. His remarks on the subject were entirely
civil and were far from actually suggesting that his singular conduct
was purely his own business and none of his solicitor's; but for a
moment or so Mr. Palford was privately just a trifle annoyed. The
Hutchinsons had traveled from London with Strangeways in their care
the day before. He would have been unhappy and disturbed if he had
been obliged to travel with Mr. Palford, who was a stranger to him,
and Miss Hutchinson had a soothing effect on him. Strangeways was for
the present comfortably installed as a guest of the house, Miss
Hutchinson having talked to the housekeeper, Mrs. Butterworth, and to
Pearson. What the future held for him Mr. Temple Barholm did not seem
to feel the necessity of going into. He left him behind as a subject,
and went on talking cheerfully of other things almost as if he had
forgotten him.
They had their coffee in the library, and afterward sat at the
writing-table and looked over documents and talked until Mr. Palford
felt that he could quite decorously retire to his bedroom. He was glad
to be relieved of his duties, and Tembarom was amiably resigned to
parting with him.
Tembarom did not go up-stairs at once himself. He sat by the fire and
smoked several pipes of tobacco and thought things over. There were a
lot of things to think over, and several decisions to make, and he
thought it would be a good idea to pass them in review. The quiet of
the dead surrounded him. In a house the size of this the servants were
probably half a mile away. They'd need trolleys to get to one, he
thought, if you rang for them in a hurry. If an armed burglar made a
quiet entry without your knowing it, he could get in some pretty rough
work before any of the seventy-five footmen could come to lend a hand.
He was not aware that there were two of them standing in waiting in
the hall, their powdered heads close together, so that their whispers
and chuckles could be heard. A sound of movement in the library would
have brought them up standing to a decorous attitude of attention
conveying to the uninitiated the impression that they had not moved
for hours.
Sometimes as he sat in the big morocco chair, T. Tembarom looked grave
enough; sometimes he looked as though he was confronting problems
which needed puzzling out and with which he was not making much
headway; sometimes he looked as though he was thinking of little Ann
Hutchinson, and not infrequently he grinned. Here he was up to the
neck in it, and he was darned if he knew what he was going to do. He
didn't know a soul, and nobody knew him. He didn't know a thing he
ought to know, and he didn't know any one who could tell him. Even the
Hutchinsons had never been inside a place like Temple Barholm, and
they were going back to Manchester after a few weeks' stay at the
grandmother's cottage.
Before he had left New York he had seen Hadman and some other fellows
and got things started, so that there was an even chance that the
invention would be put on its feet. He had worked hard and used his
own power to control money in the future as a lever which had proved
to be exactly what was needed.
Hadman had been spurred and a little startled when he realized the
magnitude of what really could be done, and saw also that this slangy,
moneyed youth was not merely an enthusiastic fool, but saw into
business schemes pretty sharply and was of a most determined
readiness. With this power ranging itself on the side of Hutchinson
and his invention, it was good business to begin to move, if one did
not want to run a chance of being left out in the cold.
Hutchinson had gone to Manchester, and there had been barely time for
a brief but characteristic interview between him and Tembarom, when he
rushed back to London. Tembarom felt rather excited when he remembered
it, recalling what he had felt in confronting the struggles against
emotion in the blunt-featured, red face, the breaks in the rough
voice, the charging up and down the room like a curiously elated bull
in a china shop, and the big effort to restrain relief and gratitude
the degree of which might seem to under-value the merits of the
invention itself.
Once or twice when he looked serious, Tembarom was thinking this over,
and also once or twice when he grinned. Relief and gratitude
notwithstanding, Hutchinson had kept him in his place, and had not
made unbounded efforts to conceal his sense of the incongruity of his
position as the controller of fortunes and the lord of Temple Barholm,
which was still vaguely flavored with indignation.
When he had finished his last pipe, Tembarom rose and knocked the
ashes out of it.
"Now for Pearson," he said.
He had made up his mind to have a talk with Pearson, and there was no
use wasting time. If things didn't suit you, the best thing was to see
what you could do to fix them right away --if it wasn't against the
law. He went out into the hall, and seeing the two footmen standing
waiting, he spoke to them.
"Say, I didn't know you fellows were there," he said. "Are you waiting
up for me? Well, you can go to bed, the sooner the quicker. Good
night." And he went up-stairs whistling.
The glow and richness and ceremonial order of preparation in his
bedroom struck him as soon as he opened the door. Everything which
could possibly have been made ready for his most luxurious comfort had
been made ready. He did not, it is true, care much for the huge bed
with its carved oak canopy and massive pillars.
"But the lying-down part looks about all right," he said to himself.
The fine linen, the soft pillows, the downy blankets, would have
allured even a man who was not tired. The covering had been neatly
turned back and the snowy whiteness opened. That was English, he
supposed. They hadn't got on to that at Mrs. Bowse's.
"But I guess a plain little old New York sleep will do," he said.
"Temple Barholm or no Temple Barholm, I guess they can't change that."
Then there sounded a quiet knock at the door. He knew who it would
turn out to be, and he was not mistaken. Pearson stood in the
corridor, wearing his slightly anxious expression, but ready for
orders.
Mr. Temple Barholm looked down at him with a friendly, if unusual,
air.
"Say, Pearson," he announced, "if you've come to wash my face and put
my hair up in crimping-pins, you needn't do it, because I'm not used
to it. But come on in."
If he had told Pearson to enter and climb the chimney, it cannot be
said that the order would have been obeyed upon the spot, but Pearson
would certainly have hesitated and explained with respectful delicacy
the fact that the task was not "his place." He came into the room.
"I came to see, if I could do anything further and--" making a
courageous onslaught upon the situation for which he had been
preparing himself for hours--"and also--if it is not too late--to
venture to trouble you with regard to your wardrobe." He coughed a
low, embarrassed cough. "In unpacking, sir, I found--I did not find--"
"You didn't find much, did you?" Tembarom assisted him.
"Of course, sir," Pearson apologized, "leaving New York so hurriedly,
your--your man evidently had not time to-- er--"
Tembarom looked at him a few seconds longer, as if making up his mind
to something. Then he threw himself easily into the big chair by the
fire, and leaned back in it with the frankest and best- natured smile
possible.
"I hadn't any man," he said. "Say, Pearson," waving his hand to
another chair near by, "suppose you take a seat."
Long and careful training came to Pearson's aid and supported him, but
he was afraid that he looked nervous, and certainly there was a lack
of entire calm in his voice.
"I--thank you, sir,--I think I'd better stand, sir."
"Why?" inquired Tembarom, taking his tobacco-pouch out of his pocket
and preparing to fill another pipe.
"You're most kind, sir, but--but--" in impassioned embarrassment--"I
should really PREFER to stand, sir, if you don't mind. I should feel
more--more at 'ome, sir," he added, dropping an h in his agitation.
"Well, if you'd like it better, that's all right," yielded Mr. Temple
Barholm, stuffing tobacco into the pipe. Pearson darted to a table,
produced a match, struck it, and gave it to him.
"Thank you," said Tembarom, still good-naturedly. "But there are a few
things I've GOT to say to you RIGHT now."
Pearson had really done his best, his very best, but he was terrified
because of the certain circumstances once before referred to.
"I beg pardon, sir," he appealed, "but I am most anxious to give
satisfaction in every respect." He WAS, poor young man, horribly
anxious. "To-day being only the first day, I dare say I have not been
all I should have been. I have never valeted an American gentleman
before, but I'm sure I shall become accustomed to everything QUITE
soon--almost immediately."
"Say," broke in Tembarom, "you're 'way off. I'm not complaining.
You're all right."
The easy good temper of his manner was so singularly assuring that
Pearson, unexplainable as he found him in every other respect, knew
that this at least was to be depended upon, and he drew an almost
palpable breath of relief. Something actually allured him into
approaching what he had never felt it safe to approach before under
like circumstances--a confidential disclosure.
"Thank you, sir: I am most grateful. The--fact is, I hoped especially
to be able to settle in place just now. I--I'm hoping to save up
enough to get married, sir."
"You are?" Tembarom exclaimed. "Good business! So was I before all
this"--he glanced about him--"fell on top of me."
"I've been saving for three years, sir, and if I can know I'm a
permanency--if I can keep this place--"
"You're going to keep it all right," Tembarom cheered him up with. "If
you've got an idea you're going to be fired, just you forget it. Cut
it right out."
"Is--I beg your pardon, sir," Pearson asked with timorous joy, "but is
that the American for saying you'll be good enough to keep me on?"
Mr. Temple Barholm thought a second.
"Is 'keep me on' the English for 'let me stay'?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then we're all right. Let's start from there. I'm going to have a
heart-to-heart talk with you, Pearson."
"Thank you, sir," said Pearson in a deferential murmur. But if he was
not dissatisfied, what was going to happen?
"It'll save us both trouble, and me most. I'm not one of those clever
Clarences that can keep up a bluff, making out I know things I don't
know. I couldn't deceive a setting hen or a Berlin wool antimacassar."
Pearson swallowed something with effort.
"You see, I fell into this thing KERCHUNK, and I'm just RATTLED--I'm
rattled." As Pearson slightly coughed again, he translated for him,
"That's American for 'I don't know where I'm at'."
"Those American jokes, sir, are very funny indeed," answered Pearson,
appreciatively.
"Funny!" the new Mr. Temple Barholm exclaimed even aggrievedly. "If
you think this lay-out is an American joke to me, Pearson, there's
where you're 'way off. Do you think it a merry jest for a fellow like
me to sit up in a high chair in a dining-room like a cathedral and not
know whether he ought to bite his own bread or not? And not dare to
stir till things are handed to him by five husky footmen? I thought
that plain-clothes man was going to cut up my meat, and slap me on the
back if I choked."
Pearson's sense of humor was perhaps not inordinate, but unseemly
mirth, which he had swallowed at the reference to the setting hen and
the Berlin wool antimacassar, momentarily got the better of him,
despite his efforts to cough it down, and broke forth in a hoarse,
ill-repressed sound.
"I beg pardon, sir," he said with a laudable endeavor to recover his
professional bearing. "It's your--American way of expressing it which
makes me forget myself. I beg pardon."
Tembarom laughed outright boyishly.
"Oh, cut that out," he said. "Say, how old are you?"
"Twenty-five, sir."
"So am I. If you'd met me three months ago, beating the streets of New
York for a living, with holes in my shoes and a celluloid collar on,
you'd have looked down on me. I know you would."
"Oh, no, sir," most falsely insisted Pearson.
"Oh, yes, you would," protested Tembarom, cheerfully. "You'd have said
I talked through my nose, and I should have laughed at you for
dropping your h's. Now you're rattled because I'm Mr. Temple Temple
Barholm; but you're not half as rattled as I am."
"You'll get over it, sir, almost immediately," Pearson assured him,
hopefully.
"Of course I shall," said Tembarom, with much courage. "But to start
right I've got to get over YOU."
"Me, sir?" Pearson breathed anxiously.
"Yes. That's what I want to get off my chest. Now, first off, you came
in here to try to explain to me that, owing to my New York valet
having left my New York wardrobe behind, I've not got anything to
wear, and so I shall have to buy some clothes."
"I failed to find any dress-shirts, sir," began Pearson, hesitatingly.
Mr. Temple Barholm grinned.
"I always failed to find them myself. I never had a dress-shirt. I
never owned a suit of glad rags in my life."
"Gl--glad rags, sir?" stammered Pearson, uncertainly.
"I knew you didn't catch on when I said that to you before dinner. I
mean claw-hammer and dress-suit things. Don't you be frightened,
Pearson. I never had six good shirts at once, or two pair of shoes, or
more than four ten-cent handkerchiefs at a time since I was born. And
when Mr. Palford yanked me away from New York, he didn't suspect a
fellow could be in such a state. And I didn't know I was in a state,
anyhow. I was too busy to hunt up people to tell me, because I was
rushing something important right through, and I couldn't stop. I just
bought the first things I set eyes on and crammed them into my trunk.
There, I guess you know the most of this, but you didn't know I knew
you knew it. Now you do, and you needn't be afraid to hurt my feelings
by telling me I haven't a darned thing I ought to have. You can go
straight ahead."
As he leaned back, puffing away at his pipe, he had thrown a leg over
the arm of his chair for greater comfort, and it really struck his
valet that he had never seen a gentleman more at his ease, even one
who WAS one. His casual candidness produced such a relief from the
sense of strain and uncertainty that Pearson felt the color returning
to his face. An opening had been given him, and it was possible for
him to do his duty.
"If you wish, sir, I will make a list," he ventured further, "and the
proper firms will send persons to bring things down from London on
appro."
"What's 'appro' the English for?"
"Approval, sir."
"Good business! Good old Pearson!"
"Thank you, sir. Shall I attend to it to-night, to be ready for the
morning post?"
"In five minutes you shall. But you threw me off the track a bit. The
thing I was really going to say was more important than the clothes
business."
There was something else, then, thought Pearson, some other unexpected
point of view.
"What have you to do for me, anyhow?"
"Valet you, sir."
"That's English for washing my face and combing my hair and putting my
socks on, ain't it?"
"Well, sir, it means doing all you require, and being always in
attendance when you change."
"How much do you get for it?"
"Thirty shillings a week, sir."
"Say, Pearson," said Tembarom, with honest feeling, "I'll give you
sixty shillings a week NOT to do it."
Calmed though he had felt a few moments ago, it cannot be denied that
Pearson was aghast. How could one be prepared for developments of such
an order?
"Not to do it, sir!" he faltered. "But what would the servants think
if you had no one to valet you?"
"That's so. What would they think?" But he evidently was not dismayed,
for he smiled widely. "I guess the plainclothes man would throw a fit."
But Pearson's view was more serious and involved a knowledge of not
improbable complications. He knew "the hall" and its points of view.
"I couldn't draw my wages, sir," he protested. "There'd be the
greatest dissatisfaction among the other servants, sir, if I didn't do
my duties. There's always a--a slight jealousy of valets and ladies'-
maids. The general idea is that they do very little to earn their
salaries. I've seen them fairly hated."
"Is that so? Well, I'll be darned! " remarked Mr. Temple Barholm. He
gave a moment to reflection, and then cheered up immensely.
"I'll tell you how we'll fix it. You come up into my room and bring
your tatting or read a newspaper while I dress." He openly chuckled.
"Holy smoke! I've GOT to put on my shirt and swear at my collar-
buttons myself. If I'm in for having a trained nurse do it for me,
it'll give me the Willies. When you danced around me before dinner--"
Pearson's horror forced him to commit the indiscretion of
interrupting.
"I hope I didn't DANCE, sir," he implored. "I tried to be extremely
quiet."
"That was it," said Tembarom. "I shouldn't have said danced; I meant
crept. I kept thinking I should tread on you, and I got so nervous
toward the end I thought I should just break down and sob on your
bosom and beg to be taken back to home and mother."
"I'm extremely sorry, sir, I am, indeed," apologized Pearson, doing
his best not to give way to hysterical giggling. How was a man to keep
a decently straight face, and if one didn't, where would it end? One
thing after another.
"It was not your fault. It was mine. I haven't a thing against you.
You're a first-rate little chap."
"I will try to be more satisfactory to-morrow."
There must be no laughing aloud, even if one burst a blood- vessel. It
would not do. Pearson hastily confronted a vision of a young footman
or Mr. Burrill himself passing through the corridors on some errand
and hearing master and valet shouting together in unseemly and wholly
incomprehensible mirth. And the next remark was worse than ever.
"No, you won't, Pearson," Mr. Temple Barholm asserted. "There's where
you're wrong. I've got no more use for a valet than I have for a pair
of straight-front corsets."
This contained a sobering suggestion.
"But you said, sir, that--"
"Oh, I'm not going to fire you," said Tembarom, genially. "I'll 'keep
you on', but little Willie is going to put on his own socks. If the
servants have to be pacified, you come up to my room and do anything
you like. Lie on the bed if you want to; get a jew's-harp and play on
it--any old thing to pass the time. And I'll raise your wages. What do
you say? Is it fixed?"
"I'm here, sir, to do anything you require," Pearson answered
distressedly; "but I'm afraid--"
Tembarom's face changed. A sudden thought had struck him.
"I'll tell you one thing you can do," he said; "you can valet that
friend of mine."
"Mr. Strangeways, sir?"
"Yes. I've got a notion he wouldn't mind it." He was not joking now.
He was in fact rather suddenly thoughtful.
"Say, Pearson, what do you think of him?"
"Well, sir, I've not seen much of him, and he says very little, but I
should think he was a GENTLEMAN, sir."
Mr. Temple Barholm seemed to think it over.
"That's queer," he said as though to himself. "That's what Ann said."
Then aloud, "Would you say he was an American?"
In his unavoidable interest in a matter much talked over below stairs
and productive of great curiosity Pearson was betrayed. He could not
explain to himself, after he had spoken, how he could have been such a
fool as to forget; but forget himself and the birthplace of the new
Mr. Temple Barholm he did.
"Oh, no, sir," he exclaimed hastily; "he's QUITE the gentleman, sir,
even though he is queer in his mind." The next instant he caught
himself and turned cold. An American or a Frenchman or an Italian, in
fact, a native of any country on earth so slighted with an
unconsciousness so natural, if he had been a man of hot temper, might
have thrown something at him or kicked him out of the room; but Mr.
Temple Barholm took his pipe out of his mouth and looked at him with a
slow, broadening smile.
"Would you call me a gentleman, Pearson?" he asked.
Of course there was no retrieving such a blunder, Pearson felt, but--
"Certainly, sir," he stammered. "Most--most CERTAINLY, sir."
"Pearson," said Tembarom, shaking his head slowly, with a grin so
good-natured that even the frankness of his words was friendly humor
itself--"Pearson, you're a liar. But that doesn't jolt me a bit. I
dare say I'm not one, anyhow. We might put an 'ad' in one of your
papers and find out."
"I--I beg your pardon, sir," murmured Pearson in actual anguish of
mind.
Mr. Temple Barholm laughed outright.
"Oh, I've not got it in for you. How could you help it?" he said. Then
he stopped joking again. "If you want to please ME," he added with
deliberation, "you look after Mr. Strangeways, and don't let anything
disturb him. Don't bother him, but just find out what he wants. When
he gets restless, come and tell me. If I'm out, tell him I'm coming
back. Don't let him worry. You understand--don't let him worry."
"I'll do my best--my very best, sir," Pearson answered devoutly. "I've
been nervous and excited this first day because I am so anxious to
please--everything seems to depend on it just now," he added, daring
another confidential outburst. "But you'll see I do know how to keep
my wits about me in general, and I've got a good memory, and I have
learned my duties, sir. I'll attend to Mr. Strangeways most
particular."
As Tembarom listened, and watched his neat, blond countenance, and
noted the undertone of quite desperate appeal in his low voice, he was
thinking of a number of things. Chiefly he was thinking of little Ann
Hutchinson and the Harlem flat which might have been "run" on fifteen
dollars a week.
"I want to know I have some one in this museum of a place who'll
UNDERSTAND," he said--"some one who'll do just exactly what I say and
ask no fool questions and keep his mouth shut. I believe you could do
it."
"I'll swear I could, sir. Trust me," was Pearson's astonishingly
emotional and hasty answer.
"I'm going to," returned Mr. Temple Barholm. "I've set my mind on
putting something through in my own way. It's a queer thing, and most
people would say I was a fool for trying it. Mr. Hutchinson does, but
Miss Hutchinson doesn't."
There was a note in his tone of saying "Miss Hutchinson doesn't" which
opened up vistas to Pearson--strange vistas when one thought of old
Mrs. Hutchinson's cottage and the estate of Temple Barholm.
"We're just about the same age," his employer continued, "and in a
sort of way we're in just about the same fix."
Their eyes looked into each other's a second; but it was not for
Pearson to presume to make any comment whatsoever upon the possible
nature of "the fix." Two or three more puffs, and Mr. Temple Barholm
spoke again.
"Say, Pearson, I don't want to butt in, but what about that little
bunch of calico of yours--the one you're saving up for?"
"Calico, sir?" said Pearson, at sea, but hopeful. Whatsoever the new
Mr. Temple Barholm meant, one began to realize that it was not likely
to be unfriendly.
"That's American for HER, Pearson. 'Her' stands for the same thing
both in English and American, I guess. What's her name and where is
she? Don't you say a word if you don't want to."
Pearson drew a step nearer. There was an extraordinary human
atmosphere in the room which caused things to begin to go on in his
breast. He had had a harder life than Tembarom because he had been
more timid and less buoyant and less unselfconscious. He had been
beaten by a drunken mother and kicked by a drunken father. He had gone
hungry and faint to the board school and had been punished as a dull
boy. After he had struggled into a place as page, he had been bullied
by footmen and had had his ears boxed by cooks and butlers. Ladies'-
maids and smart housemaids had sneered at him, and made him feel
himself a hopeless, vulgar little worm who never would "get on." But
he had got on, in a measure, because he had worked like a slave and
openly resented nothing. A place like this had been his fevered hope
and dream from his page days, though of course his imagination had not
encompassed attendance on a gentleman who had never owned a dress-
shirt in his life. Yet gentleman or no gentleman, he was a Temple
Barholm, and there was something about him, something human in his
young voice and grin and queer, unheard-of New York jokes, which
Pearson had never encountered, and which had the effect of making him
feel somehow more of a man than his timorous nature had ever allowed
of his feeling before. It suggested that they were both, valet and
master, merely masculine human creatures of like kind. The way he had
said "Miss Hutchinson" and the twinkle in his eye when he'd made that
American joke about the "little bunch of calico"! The curious fact was
that thin, neat, white-blooded-looking Pearson was passionately in
love. So he took the step nearer and grew hot and spoke low.
"Her name is Rose Merrick, sir, and she's in place in London. She's
lady's-maid to a lady of title, and it isn't an easy place. Her lady
has a high temper, and she's economical with her servants. Her maid
has to sew early and late, and turn out as much as if she was a whole
dressmaking establishment. She's clever with her needle, and it would
be easier if she felt it was appreciated. But she's treated haughty
and severe, though she tries her very best. She has to wait up half
the night after balls, and I'm afraid it's breaking her spirit and her
health. That's why,--I beg your pardon, sir," he added, his voice
shaking--"that's why I'd bear anything on earth if I could give her a
little home of her own."
"Gee whizz!" ejaculated Mr. Temple Barholm, with feeling. "I guess you
would!"
"And that's not all, sir," said Pearson. "She's a beautiful girl, sir,
with a figure, and service is sometimes not easy for a young woman
like that. His lordship--the master of the house, sir,--is much too
attentive. He's a man with bad habits; the last lady's-maid was sent
away in disgrace. Her ladyship wouldn't believe she hadn't been
forward when she saw things she didn't like, though every one in the
hall knew the girl hated his bold ways with her, and her mother nearly
broke her heart. He's begun with Rose, and it just drives me mad, sir,
it does!"
He choked, and wiped his forehead with his clean handkerchief. It was
damp, and his young eyes had fire in them, as Mr. Temple Barholm did
not fail to observe.
"I'm taking a liberty talking to you like this, sir," he said. "I'm
behaving as if I didn't know my place, sir."
"Your place is behind that fellow, kicking him till he'll never sit
down again except on eider-down cushions three deep," remarked Mr.
Temple Barholm, with fire in his eyes also. "That's where your place
is. It's where mine would be if I was in the same house with him and
caught him making a goat of himself. I bet nine Englishmen out of ten
would break his darned neck for him if they got on to his little ways,
even if they were lordships themselves."
"The decent ones won't know," Pearson said. "That's not what happens,
sir. He can laugh and chaff it off with her ladyship and coax her
round. But a girl that's discharged like that, Rose says, that's the
worst of it: she says she's got a character fastened on to her for
life that no respectable man ought to marry her with."
Mr. Temple Barholm removed his leg from the arm of his chair and got
up. Long-legged, sinewy, but somewhat slouchy in his badly made tweed
suit, sharp New York face and awful American style notwithstanding, he
still looked rather nice as he laid his hand on his valet's shoulder
and gave him a friendly push.
"See here," he said. "What you've got to say to Rose is that she's
just got to cut that sort of thing out--cut it right out. Talking to a
man that's in love with her as if he was likely to throw her down
because lies were told. Tell her to forget it --forget it quick. Why,
what does she suppose a man's FOR, by jinks? What's he FOR?"
"I've told her that, sir, though of course not in American. I just
swore it on my knees in Hyde Park one night when she got out for an
hour. But she laid her poor head on the back of the bench and cried
and wouldn't listen. She says she cares for me too much to--"
Tembarom's hand clutched his shoulder. His face lighted and glowed
suddenly.
"Care for you too much," he asked. "Did she say that? God bless her!"
"That's what I said," broke in Pearson.
"I heard another girl say that--just before I left New York--a girl
that's just a wonder," said his master. "A girl can be a wonder, can't
she?"
"Rose is, sir," protested Pearson. "She is, indeed, sir. And her eyes
are that blue--"
"Blue, are they? " interrupted Tembarom. "I know the kind. I'm on to
the whole thing. And what's more, I'm going to fix it. You tell Rose--
and tell her from me--that she's going to leave that place, and you're
going to stay in this one, and--well, presently things'll begin to
happen. They're going to be all right--ALL RIGHT," he went on, with
immensely convincing emphasis. "She's going to have that little home
of her own." He paused a moment for reflection, and then a sudden
thought presented itself to him. "Why, darn it!" he exclaimed, "there
must be a whole raft of little homes that belong to me in one place or
another. Why couldn't I fix you both up in one of them?"
"Oh, sir!" Pearson broke forth in some slight alarm. He went so fast
and so far all in a moment. And Pearson really possessed a neat, well-
ordered conscience, and, moreover, "knew his place." "I hope I didn't
seem to be expecting you to trouble yourself about me, sir. I mustn't
presume on your kindness."
"It's not kindness; it's--well, it's just human. I'm going to think
this thing over. You just keep your hair on, and let me do my own
valeting, and you'll see I'll fix it for you somehow."
What he thought of doing, how he thought of doing it, and what Pearson
was to expect, the agitated young man did not know. The situation was
of course abnormal, judged by all respectable, long-established
custom. A man's valet and his valet's "young woman" were not usually
of intimate interest. Gentlemen were sometimes "kind" to you--gave you
half a sovereign or even a sovereign, and perhaps asked after your
mother if you were supporting one; but--
"I never dreamed of going so far, sir," he said. "I forgot myself, I'm
afraid."
"Good thing you did. It's made me feel as if we were brothers." He
laughed again, enjoying the thought of the little thing who cared for
Pearson "too much" and had eyes that were "that blue." "Say, I've just
thought of something else. Have you bought her an engagement-ring
yet?"
"No, sir. In our class of life jewelry is beyond the means."
"I just wondered," Mr. Temple Barholm said. He seemed to be thinking
of something that pleased him as he fumbled for his pocket-book and
took a clean banknote out of it. "I'm not on to what the value of this
thing is in real money, but you go and buy her a ring with it, and I
bet she'll be so pleased you'll have the time of your life."
Pearson taking it; and recognizing its value in UNreal money, was
embarrassed by feeling the necessity of explanation.
"This is a five-pound note, sir. It's too much, sir, it is indeed.
This would FURNISH THE FRONT PARLOR." He said it almost solemnly.
Mr. Temple Barholm looked at the note interestedly.
"Would it? By jinks!" and his laugh had a certain softness of
recollection. "I guess that's just what Ann would say. She'd know what
it would furnish, you bet your life!"
"I'm most grateful, sir," protested Pearson, "but I oughtn't to take
it. Being an American gentleman and not accustomed to English money,
you don't realize that--"
"I'm not accustomed to any kind of money," said his master. "I'm
scared to be left alone in the room with it. That's what's the matter.
If I don't give some away, I shall never know I've got it. Cheer up,
Pearson. You take that and buy the ring, and when you start
furnishing, I'll see you don't get left."
"I don't know what to say, sir," Pearson faltered emotionally. "I
don't, indeed."
"Don't say a darned thing," replied Mr. Temple Barholm. And just here
his face changed as Mr. Palford had seen it change before, and as
Pearson often saw it change later. His New York jocular irreverence
dropped from him, and he looked mature and oddly serious.
"I've tried to sort of put you wise to the way I've lived and the
things I HAVEN'T had ever since I was born," he said, "but I guess you
don't really know a thing about it. I've got more money coming in
every year than a thousand of me would ever expect to see in their
lives, according to my calculation. And I don't know how to do any of
the things a fellow who is what you call `a gentleman' would know how
to do. I mean in the way of spending it. Now, I've got to get some fun
out of it. I should be a mutt if I didn't, so I'm going to spend it my
own way. I may make about seventy-five different kinds of a fool of
myself, but I guess I sha'n't do any particular harm."
"You'll do good, sir,--to every one."
"Shall I?--said Tembarom, speculatively. "Well, I'm not exactly
setting out with that in my mind. I'm no Young Men's Christian
Association, but I'm not in for doing harm, anyway. You take your
five-pound note--come to think of it, Palford said it came to about
twenty- five dollars, real money. Hully gee! I never thought I'd have
twenty-five dollars to GIVE AWAY! It makes me feel like I was Morgan."
"Thank you, sir; thank you," said Pearson, putting the note into his
pocket with rapt gratitude in his neat face. "You --you do not wish me
to remain--to do anything for you?"
"Not a thing. But just go and find out if Mr. Strangeways is asleep.
If he isn't and seems restless, I'll come and have a talk with him."
"Yes, sir," said Pearson, and went at once.
CHAPTER XIII
In the course of two days Mr. Palford, having given his client the
benefit of his own exact professional knowledge of the estate of
Temple Barholm and its workings and privileges as far as he found them
transferable and likely to be understood, returned to London,
breathing perhaps something like a sigh of relief when the train
steamed out of the little station. Whatsoever happened in days to
come, Palford & Grimby had done their most trying and awkward duty by
the latest Temple Barholm. Bradford, who was the steward of the
estate, would now take him over, and could be trusted to furnish
practical information of any ordinary order.
It did not appear to Mr. Palford that the new inheritor was
particularly interested in his possessions or exhilarated by the
extraordinary turn in his fortunes. The enormity of Temple Barholm
itself, regarded as a house to live in in an everyday manner, seemed
somewhat to depress him. When he was taken over its hundred and fifty
rooms, he wore a detached air as he looked about him, and such remarks
as he made were of an extraordinary nature and expressed in terms
peculiar to America. Neither Mr. Palford nor Burrill understood them,
but a young footman who was said to have once paid a visit to New
York, and who chanced to be in the picture-gallery when his new master
was looking at the portraits of his ancestors, over-hearing one
observation, was guilty of a convulsive snort, and immediately made
his way into the corridor, coughing violently. From this Mr. Palford
gathered that one of the transatlantic jokes had been made. That was
the New York idea--to be jocular. Yet he had not looked jocular when
he had made the remark which had upset the equilibrium of the young
footman. He had, in fact, looked reflective before speaking as he
stood and studied a portrait of one of his ancestors. But, then, he
had a trick of saying things incomprehensibly ridiculous with an
unmoved expression of gravity, which led Palford to feel that he was
ridiculous through utter ignorance and was not aware that he was
exposing the fact. Persons who thought that an air of seriousness
added to a humorous remark were especially annoying to the solicitor,
because they frequently betrayed one into the position of seeming to
be dull in the matter of seeing a point. That, he had observed, was
often part of the New York manner--to make a totally absurdly
exaggerated or seemingly ignorance-revealing observation, and then
leave one's hearer to decide for himself whether the speaker was an
absolute ignoramus and fool or a humorist.
More than once he had somewhat suspected his client of meaning to "get
a rise out of him," after the odious manner of the tourists described
in "The Innocents Abroad," though at the same time he felt rather
supportingly sure of the fact that generally, when he displayed
ignorance, he displayed it because he was a positive encyclopedia of
lack of knowledge.
He knew no more of social customs, literature, and art than any other
street lad. He had not belonged to the aspiring self-taught, who
meritoriously haunt the night schools and free libraries with a view
to improving their minds. If this had been his method, he might in one
sense have been more difficult to handle, as Palford had seen the
thing result in a bumptiousness most objectionable. He was markedly
not bumptious, at all events.
A certain degree of interest in or curiosity concerning his ancestors
as represented in the picture-gallery Mr. Palford had observed. He had
stared at them and had said queer things --sometimes things which
perhaps indicated a kind of uneducated thought. The fact that some of
them looked so thoroughly alive, and yet had lived centuries ago,
seemed to set him reflecting oddly. His curiosity, however, seemed to
connect itself with them more as human creatures than as historical
figures.
"What did that one do?" he inquired more than once. "What did he
start, or didn't he start anything?"
When he disturbed the young footman he had stopped before a dark man
in armor.
"Who's this fellow in the tin overcoat?" he asked seriously, and
Palford felt it was quite possible that he had no actual intent of
being humorous.
"That is Miles Gaspard Nevil John, who fought in the Crusades with
Richard Coeur de Lion," he explained. "He is wearing a suit of armor."
By this time the footman was coughing in the corridor.
"That's English history, I guess," Tembarom replied. "I'll have to get
a history-book and read up about the Crusades."
He went on farther, and paused with a slightly puzzled expression
before a boy in a costume of the period of Charles II.
"Who's this Fauntleroy in the lace collar?" he inquired. "Queer!" he
added, as though to himself. "I can't ever have seen him in New York."
And he took a step backward to look again.
"That is Miles Hugo Charles James, who was a page at the court of
Charles II. He died at nineteen, and was succeeded by his brother
Denzel Maurice John."
"I feel as if I'd had a dream about him sometime or other," said
Tembarom, and he stood still a few seconds before he passed on.
"Perhaps I saw something like him getting out of a carriage to go into
the Van Twillers' fancy-dress ball. Seems as if I'd got the whole show
shut up in here. And you say they're all my own relations?" Then he
laughed. "If they were alive now!" he said. "By jinks!"
His laughter suggested that he was entertained by mental visions. But
he did not explain to his companion. His legal adviser was not in the
least able to form any opinion of what he would do, how he would be
likely to comport himself, when he was left entirely to his own
devices. He would not know also, one might be sure, that the county
would wait with repressed anxiety to find out. If he had been a minor,
he might have been taken in hand, and trained and educated to some
extent. But he was not a minor.
On the day of Mr. Palford's departure a thick fog had descended and
seemed to enwrap the world in the white wool. Tembarom found it close
to his windows when he got up, and he had dressed by the light of tall
wax candles, the previous Mr. Temple Barholm having objected to more
modern and vulgar methods of illumination.
"I guess this is what you call a London fog," he said to Pearson.
"No, not exactly the London sort, sir," Pearson answered. "A London
fog is yellow--when it isn't brown or black. It settles on the hands
and face. A fog in the country isn't dirty with smoke. It's much less
trying, sir."
When Palford had departed and he was entirely alone, Tembarom found a
country fog trying enough for a man without a companion. A degree of
relief permeated his being with the knowledge that he need no longer
endeavor to make suitable reply to his solicitor's efforts at
conversation. He had made conversational efforts himself. You couldn't
let a man feel that you wouldn't talk to him if you could when he was
doing business for you, but what in thunder did you have to talk about
that a man like that wouldn't be bored stiff by? He didn't like New
York, he didn't know anything about it, and he didn't want to know,
and Tembarom knew nothing about anything else, and was homesick for
the very stones of the roaring city's streets. When he said anything,
Palford either didn't understand what he was getting at or he didn't
like it. And he always looked as if he was watching to see if you were
trying to get a joke on him. Tembarom was frequently not nearly so
much inclined to be humorous as Mr. Palford had irritably suspected
him of being. His modes of expression might on numerous occasions have
roused to mirth when his underlying idea was almost entirely serious.
The mode of expression was merely a result of habit.
Mr. Palford left by an extremely early train, and after he was gone,
Tembarom sat over his breakfast as long as possible, and then, going
to the library, smoked long. The library was certainly comfortable,
though the fire and the big wax candles were called upon to do their
best to defy the chill, mysterious dimness produced by the heavy,
white wool curtain folding itself more and more thickly outside the
windows.
But one cannot smoke in solitary idleness for much more than an hour,
and when he stood up and knocked the ashes out of his last pipe,
Tembarom drew a long breath.
"There's a hundred and thirty-six hours in each of these days," he
said. "That's nine hundred and fifty-two in a week, and four thousand
and eighty in a month--when it's got only thirty days in it. I'm not
going to calculate how many there'd be in a year. I'll have a look at
the papers. There's Punch. That's their comic one."
He looked out the American news in the London papers, and sighed
hugely. He took up Punch and read every joke two or three times over.
He did not know that the number was a specially good one and that
there were some extremely witty things in it. The jokes were about
bishops in gaiters, about garden-parties, about curates or lovely
young ladies or rectors' wives and rustics, about Royal Academicians
or esthetic poets. Their humor appealed to him as little and seemed as
obscure as his had seemed to Mr. Palford.
"I'm not laughing my head off much over these," he said. "I guess I'm
not on to the point."
He got up and walked about. The "L" in New York was roaring to and fro
loaded with men and women going to work or to do shopping. Some of
them were devouring morning papers bearing no resemblance to those of
London, some of them carried parcels, and all of them looked as though
they were intent on something or other and hadn't a moment to waste.
They were all going somewhere in a hurry and had to get back in time
for something. When the train whizzed and slackened at a station, some
started up, hastily caught their papers or bundles closer, and pushed
or were pushed out on the platform, which was crowded with other
people who rushed to get in, and if they found seats, dropped into
them hastily with an air of relief. The street-cars were loaded and
rang their bells loudly, trucks and carriages and motors filled the
middle of the thoroughfares, and people crowded the pavements. The
store windows were dressed up for Christmas, and most of the people
crowded before them were calculating as to what they could get for the
inadequate sums they had on hand.
The breakfast at Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house was over, and the
boarders had gone on cars or elevated trains to their day's work. Mrs.
Bowse was getting ready to go out and do some marketing. Julius and
Jim were down-town deep in the work pertaining to their separate
"jobs." They'd go home at night, and perhaps, if they were in luck,
would go to a "show" somewhere, and afterward come and sit in their
tilted chairs in the hall bedroom and smoke and talk it over. And he
wouldn't be there, and the Hutchinsons' rooms would be empty, unless
some new people were in them. Galton would be sitting among his
papers, working like mad. And Bennett--well, Bennett would be either
"getting out his page," or would be rushing about in the hundredth
streets to find items and follow up weddings or receptions.
"Gee!" he said, "every one of them trying their best to put something
over, and with so much to think of they've not got time to breathe!
It'd be no trouble for THEM to put in a hundred and thirty-six hours.
They'd be darned glad of them. And, believe me, they'd put something
over, too, before they got through. And I'm here, with three hundred
and fifty thousand dollars a year round my neck and not a thing to
spend it on, unless I pay some one part of it to give me lessons in
tatting. What is tatting, anyhow?
He didn't really know. It was vaguely supposed to imply some intensely
feminine fancy-work done by old ladies, and used as a figure of speech
in jokes.
"If you could ride or shoot, you could amuse yourself in the country,"
Palford had said.
"I can ride in a street-car when I've got five cents," Tembarom had
answered. " That's as far as I've gone in riding --and what in thunder
should I shoot?"
"Game," replied Mr. Palford, with chill inward disgust. "Pheasants,
partridges, woodcock, grouse--"
"I shouldn't shoot anything like that if I went at it," he responded
shamelessly. "I should shoot my own head off, or the fellow's that
stood next to me, unless he got the drop on me first."
He did not know that he was ignominious. Nobody could have made it
clear to him. He did not know that there were men who had gained
distinction, popularity, and fame by doing nothing in particular but
hitting things animate and inanimate with magnificent precision of
aim.
He stood still now and listened to the silence.
"There's not a sound within a thousand miles of the place. What do
fellows with money DO to keep themselves alive?" he said piteously.
"They've got to do SOMETHING. Shall I have to go out and take a walk,
as Palford called it? Take a walk, by gee!"
He couldn't conceive it, a man "taking a walk" as though it were
medicine--a walk nowhere, to reach nothing, just to go and turn back
again.
"I'll begin and take in sewing," he said, "or I'll open a store in the
village--a department store. I could spend something on that. I'll ask
Pearson what he thinks of it-- or Burrill. I'd like to see Burrill if
I said that to him."
He decided at last that he would practise his "short" awhile; that
would be doing something, at any rate. He sat down at the big writing-
table and began to dash off mystic signs at furious speed. But the
speed did not keep up. The silence of the great room, of the immense
house, of all the scores of rooms and galleries and corridors, closed
in about him. He had practised his "short" in the night school, with
the "L" thundering past at intervals of five minutes; in the newspaper
office, with all the babel of New York about him and the bang of
steam-drills going on below in the next lot, where the foundation of a
new building was being excavated; he had practised it in his hall
bedroom at Mrs. Bowse's, to the tumultuous accompaniment of street
sounds and the whizz and TING-A-LING of street-cars dashing past, and
he had not been disturbed. He had never practised it in any place
which was silent, and it was the silence which became more than he
could stand. He actually jumped out of his chair when he heard
mysterious footsteps outside the door, and a footman appeared and
spoke in a low voice which startled him as though it had been a
thunderclap.
"A young person with her father wants to see you, sir," he announced.
"I don't think they are villagers, but of the working-class, I should
say."
"Where are they?"
"I didn't know exactly what to do, sir, so I left them in the hall.
The young person has a sort of quiet, determined way--"
"Little Ann, by gee!" exclaimed Tembarom with mad joy, and shot out of
the room.
The footman--he had not seen Little Ann when she had brought
Strangeways--looked after him and rubbed his chin.
"Wouldn't you call that a rummy sort for Temple Barholm?" he said to
one of his fellows who had appeared in the hall near him.
"It's not my sort," was the answer. "I'm going to give notice to old
Butterworth."
Hutchinson and Little Ann were waiting in the hall. Hutchinson was
looking at the rich, shadowy spaces about him with a sort of proud
satisfaction. Fine, dark corners with armored figures lurking in them,
ancient portraits, carved oak settles, and massive chairs and
cabinets--these were English, and he was an Englishman, and somehow
felt them the outcome of certain sterling qualities of his own. He
looked robustly well, and wore a new rough tweed suit such as one of
the gentry might tramp about muddy roads and fields in. Little Ann was
dressed in something warm and rough also, a brown thing, with a little
close, cap-like, brown hat, from under which her red hair glowed. The
walk in the cold, white fog had made her bloom fresh, soft-red and
white-daisy color. She was smiling, and showing three distinct
dimples, which deepened when Tembarom dashed out of the library.
"Hully gee!" he cried out, "but I'm glad to see you!"
He shook hands with both of them furiously, and two footmen stood and
looked at the group with image-like calm of feature, but with
curiously interested eyes. Hutchinson was aware of them, and
endeavored to present to them a back which by its stolid composure
should reveal that he knew more about such things than this chap did
and wasn't a bit upset by grandeur.
"Hully gee!" cried Tembarom again, "how glad I am! Come on in and sit
down and let's talk it over."
Burrill made a stately step forward, properly intent on his duty, and
his master waved him back.
"Say," he said hastily, "don't bring in any tea. They don't want it.
They're Americans."
Hutchinson snorted. He could not stand being consigned to ignominy
before the footmen.
"Nowt o' th' sort," he broke forth. " We're noan American. Tha'rt
losing tha head, lad."
"He's forgetting because he met us first in New York," said Little
Ann, smiling still more.
"Shall I take your hat and cane, sir?" inquired Burrill, unmovedly, at
Hutchinson's side.
"He wasn't going to say anything about tea," explained Little Ann as
they went into the library. "They don't expect to serve tea in the
middle of the morning, Mr. Temple Barholm."
"Don't they?" said Tembarom, reckless with relieved delight. "I
thought they served it every time the clock struck. When we were in
London it seemed like Palford had it when he was hot and when he was
cold and when he was glad and when he was sorry and when he was going
out and when he was coming in. It's brought up to me, by jinks! as
soon as I wake, to brace me up to put on my clothes--and Pearson wants
to put those on."
He stopped short when they reached the middle of the room and looked
her over.
"O Little Ann!" he breathed tumultuously. "0 Little Ann!"
Mr. Hlutchinson was looking about the library as he had looked about
the hall.
"Well, I never thought I'd get inside Temple Barlholm in my day," he
exclaimed. "Eh, lad, tha must feel like bull in a china shop."
"I feel like a whole herd of 'em," answered Tembarom. Hutchinson
nodded. He understood.
"Well, perhaps tha'll get over it in time," he conceded, "but it'll
take thee a good bit." Then he gave him a warmly friendly look. "I'll
lay you know what Ann came with me for to-day." The way Little Ann
looked at him--the way she looked at him!
"I came to thank you, Mr. Temple Barholm," she said--"to thank you."
And there was an odd, tender sound in her voice.
"Don't you do it, Ann," Tembarom answered. "Don't you do it."
"I don't know much about business, but the way you must have worked,
the way you must have had to run after people, and find them, and make
then listen, and use all your New York cleverness--because you ARE
clever. The way you've forgotten all about yourself and thought of
nothing but father and the invention! I do know enough to understand
that, and it seems as if I can't think of enough to say. I just wish I
could tell you what it means to me." Two round pearls of tears brimmed
over and fell down her cheeks. "I promised mother FAITHFUL I'd take
care of him and see he never lost hope about it," she added, "and
sometimes I didn't know whatever I was going to do."
It was perilous when she looked at one like that, and she was so
little and light that one could have snatched her up in his arms and
carried her to the big arm-chair and sat down with her and rocked her
backward and forward and poured forth the whole thing that was making
him feel as though he might explode.
Hutchinson provided salvation.
"Tha pulled me out o' the water just when I was going under, lad. God
bless thee!" he broke out, and shook his hand with rough vigor. "I
signed with the North Electric yesterday."
"Good business!" said Tembarom. "Now I'm in on the ground floor with
what's going to be the biggest money-maker in sight."
"The way tha talked New York to them chaps took my fancy," chuckled
Hutchinson. "None o' them chaps wants to be the first to jump over the
hedge."
"We've got 'em started now," exulted Tembarom.
"Tha started 'em," said Hutchinson, "and it's thee I've got to thank."
"Say, Little Ann," said Tembarom, with sudden thought, "who's come
into money now? You'll have it to burn."
"We've not got it yet, Mr. Temple Barholm," she replied, shaking her
head. "Even when inventions get started, they don't go off like sky-
rockets."
"She knows everything, doesn't she?" Tembarom said to Hutchinson.
"Here, come and sit down. I've not seen you for 'steen years."
She took her seat in the big arm-chair and looked at him with softly
examining eyes, as though she wanted to understand him sufficiently to
be able to find out something she ought to do if he needed help.
He saw it and half laughed, not quite unwaveringly.
"You'll make me cry in a minute," he said. " You don't know what it's
like to have some one from home and mother come and be kind to you."
"How is Mr. Strangeways?" she inquired.
"He's well taken care of, at any rate. That's where he's got to thank
you. Those rooms you and the housekeeper chose were the very things
for him. They're big and comfortable, and 'way off in a place where no
one's likely to come near. The fellow that's been hired to valet me
valets him instead, and I believe he likes it. It seems to come quite
natural to him, any how. I go in and see him every now and then and
try to get him to talk. I sort of invent things to see if I can start
him thinking straight. He's quieted down some and he looks better.
After a while I'm going to look up some big doctors in London and find
out which of 'em's got the most plain horse sense. If a real big one
would just get interested and come and see him on the quiet and not
get him excited, he might do him good. I'm dead stuck on this stunt
I've set myself--getting him right. It's something to work on."
"You'll have plenty to work on soon," said Little Ann. "There's a lot
of everyday things you've got to think about. They may seem of no
consequence to you, but they ARE, Mr. Temple Barholm."
"If you say they are, I guess they are," he answered. "I'll do
anything you say, Ann."
"I came partly to tell you about some of them to-day," she went on,
keeping the yearningly thoughtful eyes on him. It was rather hard for
her, too, to be firm enough when there was so much she wanted to say
and do. And he did not look half as twinkling and light-heartedly
grinning as he had looked in New York.
He couldn't help dropping his voice a little coaxingly, though Mr.
Hutchinson was quite sufficiently absorbed in examination of his
surroundings.
"Didn't you come to save my life by letting me have a look at you,
Little Ann--didn't you?" he pleaded.
She shook her wonderful, red head.
"No, I didn't, Mr. Temple Barholm," she answered with Manchester
downrightness. " When I said what I did in New York, I meant it. I
didn't intend to hang about here and let you--say things to me. You
mustn't say them. Father and me are going back to Manchester in a few
days, and very soon we have to go to America again because of the
business."
"America!" he said. "Oh, Lord!" he groaned. "Do you want me to drop
down dead here with a dull, sickening thud, Ann? "
"You're not going to drop down dead," she replied convincedly. "You're
going to stay here and do whatever it's your duty to do, now you've
come into Temple Barholm."
"Am I?" he answered. "Well, we'll see what I'm going to do when I've
had time to make up my mind. It may be something different from what
you'd think, and it mayn't. Just now I'm going to do what you tell me.
Go ahead, Little Ann."
She thought the matter over with her most destructive little air of
sensible intentness.
"Well, it may seem like meddling, but it isn't," she began rather
concernedly. "It's just that I'm used to looking after people. I
wanted to talk to you about your clothes."
"My clothes?" he replied, bewildered a moment; but the next he
understood and grinned. "I haven't got any. My valet--think of T. T.
with a valet!--told me so last night."
"That's what I thought," she said maternally." I got Mrs. Bowse to
write to me, and she told me you were so hurried and excited you
hadn't time for anything."
"I just rushed into Cohen's the last day and yanked a few things off
the ready-made counter."
She looked him over with impersonal criticism.
"I thought so. Those you've got on won't do at all."
Tembarom glanced at them.
"That's what Pearson says."
"They're not the right shape," she explained. "I know what a
gentleman's clothes mean in England, and--" her face flushed, and
sudden, warm spirit made her speak rather fast-- "I couldn't ABIDE to
think of you coming here and--being made fun of--just because you
hadn't the right clothes."
She said it, the little thing, as though he were hers--her very own,
and defend him against disrespect she WOULD. Tembarom, being but young
flesh and blood, made an impetuous dart toward her, and checked
himself, catching his breath.
"Ann," he said, "has your grandmother got a dog?"
"Y-e-s," she said, faltering because she was puzzled.
"How big is he?"
"He's a big one. He's a brindled bulldog. Why?"
"Well," he said, half pathetic, half defiant, "if you're going to come
and talk to me like that, and look like that, you've got to bring that
bull along and set him on me when I make a break; for there's nothing
but a dog can keep me where you want me to stay--and a big one at
that."
He sat down on an ottoman near her and dropped his head on his hands.
It was not half such a joke as it sounded.
Little Ann saw it wasn't and she watched him tenderly, catching her
breath once quickly. Men had ways of taking some things hard and
feeling them a good bit more than one would think. It made trouble
many a time if one couldn't help them to think reasonable.
"Father," she said to Hutchinson.
"Aye," he answered, turning round.
"Will you tell Mr. Temple Barholm that you think I'm right about
giving him his chance?"
"Of course I think she's right," Hutchinson blustered, "and it isn't
the first time either. I'm not going to have my lass married into any
family where she'd be looked down upon."
But that was not what Little Ann wanted; it was not, in fact, her
argument. She was not thinking of that side of the situation.
"It's not me that matters so much, Father," she said; "it's him."
"Oh, is it?" disagreed Hutchinson, dictatorially. "That's not th' road
I look at it. I'm looking after you, not him. Let him take care of
himself. No chap shall put you where you won't be looked up to, even
if I AM grateful to him. So there you have it."
"He can't take care of himself when he feels like this," she answered.
"That's WHY I'm taking care of him. He'll think steadier when he's
himself again." She put out her hand and softly touched his shoulder.
"Don't do that," she said. "You make me want to be silly." There was a
quiver in her voice, but she tried to change it. "If you don't lift
your head," she added with a great effort at disciplinarian firmness,
"I shall have to go away without telling you the other things."
He lifted his head, but his attempt at a smile was not hilarious.
"Well, Ann," he submitted, " I've warned you. Bring along your dog."
She took a sheet of paper out of one of the neat pockets in her rough,
brown coat.
"I just wrote down some of the very best tailors' addresses --the very
best," she explained. "Don't you go to any but the very best, and be a
bit sharp with them if they're not attentive. They'll think all the
better of you. If your valet's a smart one, take him with you."
"Yes, Ann," he said rather weakly. "He's going to make a list of
things himself, anyhow."
"That sounds as if he'd got some sense." She handed him the list of
addresses. "You give him this, and tell him he must go to the very
best ones."
"What do I want to put on style for?" he asked desperately. "I don't
know a soul on this side of the Atlantic Ocean."
"You soon will," she replied, with calm perspicacity. "You've got too
much money not to."
A gruff chuckle made itself heard from Hutchinson's side of the room.
"Aye, seventy thousand a year'll bring th' vultures about thee, lad."
"We needn't call them vultures exactly," was Little Ann's tolerant
comment; "but a lot of people will come here to see you. That was one
of the things I thought I might tell you about."
"Say, you're a wonder!"
"I'm nothing of the sort. I'm just a girl with a bit of common sense--
and grandmother's one that's looked on a long time, and she sees
things. The country gentlemen will begin to call on you soon, and then
you'll be invited to their houses to meet their wives and daughters,
and then you'll be kept pretty busy."
Hutchinson's bluff chuckle broke out again.
"You will that, my lad, when th' match-making mothers get after you.
There's plenty on 'em."
"Father's joking," she said. Her tone was judicially unprejudiced.
"There are young ladies that--that'd be very suitable. Pretty ones and
clever ones. You'll see them all."
"I don't want to see them."
"You can't help it," she said, with mild decision. "When there are
daughters and a new gentleman comes into a big property in the
neighborhood, it's nothing but natural that the mothers should be a
bit anxious."
"Aye, they'll be anxious enough. Mak' sure o' that," laughed
Hutchinson.
"Is that what you want me to put on style for, Little Ann?" Tembarom
asked reproachfully.
"I want you to put it on for yourself. I don't want you to look
different from other men. Everybody's curious about you. They're ready
to LAUGH because you came from America and once sold newspapers."
"It's the men he'll have to look out for," Hutchinson put in, with an
experienced air. "There's them that'll want to borrow money, and them
that'll want to drink and play cards and bet high. A green American
lad'll be a fine pigeon for them to pluck. You may as well tell him,
Ann; you know you came here to do it."
"Yes, I did," she admitted. "I don't want you to seem not to know what
people are up to and what they expect."
That little note of involuntary defense was a dangerous thing for
Tembarom. He drew nearer.
"You don't want them to take me for a fool, Little Ann. You're
standing up for me; that's it."
"You can stand up for yourself, Mr. Temple Barholm, if you're not
taken by surprise," she said confidently. "If you understand things a
bit, you won't be."
His feelings almost overpowered him.
"God bless your dear little soul!" he broke out. "Say, if this goes
on, that dog of your grandmother's wouldn't have a show, Ann. I should
bite him before he could bite me."
"I won't go on if you can't be sensible, Mr. Temple Barholm. I shall
just go away and not come back again. That's what I shall do." Her
tone was that of a young mother.
He gave in incontinently.
"Good Lord! no!" he exclaimed. "I'll do anything if you'll stay. I'll
lie down on the mat and not open my mouth. Just sit here and tell me
things. I know you won't let me hold your hand, but just let me hold a
bit of your dress and look at you while you talk." He took a bit of
her brown frock between his fingers and held it, gazing at her with
all his crude young soul in his eyes. "Now tell me," he added.
"There's only one or two things about the people who'll come to Temple
Barholm. Grandmother's talked it over with me. She knew all about
those that came in the late Mr. Temple Barholm's time. He used to hate
most of them."
"Then why in thunder did he ask them to come?"
"He didn't. They've got clever, polite ways of asking themselves
sometimes. He couldn't bear the Countess of Mallowe. She'll come.
Grandmother says you may be sure of that."
"What'll she come for?"
Little Ann's pause and contemplation of him were fraught with
thoughtfulness.
"She'll come for you," at last she said.
"She's got a daughter she thinks ought to have been married eight
years ago," announced Hutchinson.
Tembarom pulled at the bit of brown tweed he held as though it were a
drowning man's straw.
"Don't you drive me to drink, Ann," he said. "I'm frightened. Your
grandmother will have to lend ME the dog."
This was a flightiness which Little Ann did not encourage.
"Lady Joan--that's her daughter--is very grand and haughty. She's a
great beauty. You'll look at her, but perhaps she won't look at you.
But it's not her I'm troubled about. I'm thinking of Captain Palliser
and men like him."
"Who's he?"
"He's one of those smooth, clever ones that's always getting up some
company or other and selling the stock. He'll want you to know his
friends and he'll try to lead you his way."
As Tembarom held to his bit of her dress, his eyes were adoring ones,
which was really not to be wondered at. She WAS adorable as her soft,
kind, wonderfully maternal girl face tried to control itself so that
it should express only just enough to help and nothing to disturb.
"I don't want him to spoil you. I don't want anything to make you--
different. I couldn't bear it."
He pulled the bit of dress pleadingly.
"Why, Little Ann?" he implored quite low.
"Because," she said, feeling that perhaps she was rash-- "because if
you were different, you wouldn't be T. Tembarom; and it was T.
Tembarom that--that was T. Tembarom," she finished hastily.
He bent his head down to the bit of tweed and kissed it.
"You just keep looking after me like that," he said, "and there's not
one of them can get away with me."
She got up, and he rose with her. There was a touch of fire in the
forget-me-not blue of her eyes.
"Just you let them see--just you let them see that you're not one they
can hold light and make use of." But there she stopped short, looking
up at him. He was looking down at her with a kind of matureness in his
expression. "I needn't be afraid," she said. "You can take care of
yourself; I ought to have known that."
"You did," he said, smiling; "but you wanted to sort of help me. And
you've done it, by gee! just by saying that thing about T. Tembarom.
You set me right on my feet. That's YOU."
Before they went away they paid a visit to Strangeways in his remote,
undisturbed, and beautiful rooms. They were in a wing of the house
untouched by any ordinary passing to and fro, and the deep windows
looked out upon gardens which spring and summer would crowd with
loveliness from which clouds of perfume would float up to him on days
when the sun warmed and the soft airs stirred the flowers, shaking the
fragrance from their full incense-cups. But the white fog shut out to-
day even their winter bareness. There were light and warmth inside,
and every added charm of rich harmony of deep color and comfort made
beautiful. There were books and papers waiting to be looked over, but
they lay untouched on the writing-table, and Strangeways was sitting
close to the biggest window, staring into the fog. His eyes looked
hungry and hollow and dark. Ann knew he was "trying to remember"
something.
When the sound of footsteps reached his ear, he turned to look at
them, and rose mechanically at sight of Ann. But his expression was
that of a man aroused from a dream of far-off places.
"I remember you," he said, but hesitated as though making an effort to
recall something.
"Of course you do," said Little Ann. "You know me quite well. I
brought you here. Think a bit. Little--Little--"
"Yes," he broke forth. "Of course, Little Ann! Thank God I've not
forgotten." He took her hand in both his and held it tenderly. "You
have a sweet little face. It's such a wise little face!" His voice
sounded dreamy.
Ann drew him to his chair with a coaxing laugh and sat down by him.
"You're flattering me. You make me feel quite shy," she said. "You
know HIM, too," nodding toward Tembarom.
"Oh, yes," he replied, and be looked up with a smile. "He is the one
who remembers. You said you did." He had turned to Tembarom.
"You bet your life I do," Tembarom answered. "And you will, too,
before long."
"If I did not try so hard," said Strangeways, thoughtfully. "It seems
as if I were shut up in a room, and so many things were knocking at
the doors--hundreds of them--knocking because they want to be let in.
I am damnably unhappy-- damnably." He hung his head and stared at the
floor. Tembarom put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a friendly
shake.
"Don't you worry a bit," he said. "You take my word for it. It'll all
come back. I'm working at it myself." Strangeways lifted his head.
"You are the one I know best. I trust you." But there was the
beginning of a slight drag in his voice. "I don't always --quite
recollect--your name. Not quite. Good heavens! I mustn't forget that."
Little Ann was quite ready.
"You won't," she said, "because it's different from other names. It
begins with a letter--just a letter, and then there is the name.
Think."
"Yes, yes," he said anxiously.
Little Ann bent forward and fixed her eyes on his with concentrated
suggestion. They had never risked confusing him by any mention of the
new name. She began to repeat letters of the alphabet slowly and
distinctly until she reached the letter T.
"T," she ended with much emphasis--"R. S. _T_."
His expression cleared itself.
"T," he repeated. "T--Tembarom. R, S, T. How clever you are!"
Little Ann's gaze concentrated itself still more intently.
"Now you'll never forget it again," she said, "because of the T.
You'll say the other letters until you come to it. R, S, T."
"T. Tembarom," he ended relievedly. "How you help me!" He took her
hand and kissed it very gently.
"We are all going to help you," Ann soothed him, "T. Tembarom most of
all."
"Say," Tembarom broke out in an aside to her, "I'm going to come here
and try things on him every day. When it seems like he gets on to
something, however little a thing it is, I'm going to follow it up and
see if it won't get somewhere."
Ann nodded.
"There'll be something some day," she said. "Are you quite comfortable
here?" she asked aloud to Strangeways.
"Very comfortable, thank you," he answered courteously. "They are
beautiful rooms. They are furnished with such fine old things. This is
entirely Jacobean. It's quite perfect." He glanced about him. "And so
quiet. No one comes in here but my man, and he is a very nice chap. I
never had a man who knew his duties better."
Little Ann and Tembarom looked at each other.
"I shouldn't be a bit surprised," she said after they had left the
room, "if it wouldn't be a good thing to get Pearson to try to talk to
him now and then. He's been used to a man-servant."
"Yes," answered Tembarom. "Pearson didn't rattle HIM, you bet your
life."
CHAPTER XIV
He could not persuade them to remain to take lunch with him. The
firmness of Hutchinson's declination was not unconnected with a
private feeling that "them footmen chaps 'u'd be on the lookout to see
the way you handled every bite you put in your mouth." He couldn't
have stood it, dang their impudence! Little Ann, on her part, frankly
and calmly said, "It wouldn't DO." That was all, and evidently covered
everything.
After they had gone, the fog lifted somewhat, but though it withdrew
from the windows, it remained floating about in masses, like huge
ghosts, among the trees of the park. When Tembarom sat down alone to
prolong his lunch with the aid of Burrill and the footmen, he was
confronted by these unearthly shapes every time he lifted his eyes to
the window he faced from his place at the table. It was an outlook
which did not inspire to cheerfulness, and the fact that Ann and her
father were going back to Manchester and later to America left him
without even the simple consolation of a healthy appetite. Things were
bound to get better after a while; they were BOUND to. A fellow would
be a fool if he couldn't fix it somehow so that he could enjoy
himself, with money to burn. If you made up your mind you couldn't
stand the way things were, you didn't have to lie down under them,
with a thousand or so "per" coming in. You could fix it so that it
would be different. By jinks! there wasn't any law against your giving
it all to the church but just enough to buy a flat in Harlem out-
right, if you wanted to. But you weren't going to run crazy and do a
lot of fool things in a minute, and be sorry the rest of your life.
Money was money. And first and foremost there was Ann, with her round
cheeks flushed and her voice all sweet and queer, saying, "You
wouldn't be T. Tembarom; and it was T. Tembarom that--that was T.
Tembarom."
He couldn't help knowing what she had begun to say, and his own face
flushed as he thought of it. He was at that time of life when there
generally happens to be one center about which the world revolves. The
creature who passes through this period of existence without watching
it revolve about such a center has missed an extraordinary and
singularly developing experience. It is sometimes happy, often
disastrous, but always more or less developing. Speaking calmly,
detachedly, but not cynically, it is a phase. During its existence it
is the blood in the veins, the sight of the eyes, the beat of the
pulse, the throb of the heart. It is also the day and the night, the
sun, the moon, and the stars, heaven and hell, the entire universe.
And it doesn't matter in the least to any one but the creatures living
through it. T. Tembarom was in the midst of it. There was Ann. There
was this new crazy thing which had happened to him--"this fool thing,"
as he called it. There was this monstrous, magnificent house,--he knew
it was magnificent, though it wasn't his kind,--there was old Palford
and his solemn talk about ancestors and the name of Temple Barholm. It
always reminded him of how ashamed he had been in Brooklyn of the
"Temple Temple" and how he had told lies to prevent the fellows
finding out about it. And there was seventy thousand pounds a year,
and there was Ann, who looked as soft as a baby,--Good Lord! how soft
she'd feel if you got her in your arms and squeezed her!--and yet was
somehow strong enough to keep him just where she wanted him to stay
and believed he ought to stay until "he had found out." That was it.
She wasn't doing it for any fool little idea of making herself seem
more important: she just believed it. She was doing it because she
wanted to let him "have his chance," just as if she were his mother
instead of the girl he was clean crazy about. His chance! He laughed
outright--a short, confident laugh which startled Burrill exceedingly.
When he went back to the library and lighted his pipe he began to
stride up and down as he continued to think it over.
"I wish she was as sure as I am," he said. "I wish she was as sure of
me as I am of myself--and as I am of her." He laughed the short,
confident laugh again. "I wish she was as sure as I am of us both.
We're all right. I've got to get through this, and find out what it's
best to do, and I've got to show her. When I've had my chance good and
plenty, us two for little old New York! Gee! won't it be fine!" he
exclaimed imaginatively. "Her going over her bills, looking like a
peach of a baby that's trying to knit its brows, and adding up, and
thinking she ought to economize. She'd do it if we had ten million."
He laughed outright joyfully. "Good Lord! I should kiss her to death!"
The simplest process of ratiocination would lead to a realization of
the fact that though he was lonely and uncomfortable, he was not in
the least pathetic or sorry for himself. His normal mental and
physical structure kept him steady on his feet, and his practical and
unsentimental training, combining itself with a touch of iron which
centuries ago had expressed itself through some fighting Temple
Barholm and a medium of battle-axes, crossbows, and spears, did the
rest.
"It'd take more than this to get me where I'd be down and out. I'm
feeling fine," he said. "I believe I'll go and 'take a walk,' as
Palford says."
The fog-wreaths in the park were floating away, and he went out
grinning and whistling, giving Burrill and the footman a nod as he
passed them with a springing young stride. He got the door open so
quickly that he left them behind him frustrated and staring at each
other.
"It wasn't our fault," said Burrill, gloomily. "He's never had a door
opened for him in his life. This won't do for me."
He was away for about an hour, and came back in the best of spirits.
He had found out that there was something in "taking a walk" if a
fellow had nothing else to do. The park was "fine," and he had never
seen anything like it. When there were leaves on the trees and the
grass and things were green, it would be better than Central Park
itself. You could have base-ball matches in it. What a cinch it would
be if you charged gate-money! But he supposed you couldn't if it
belonged to you and you had three hundred and fifty thousand a year.
You had to get used to that. But it did seem a fool business to have
all that land and not make a cent out of it. If it was just outside
New York and you cut it up into lots, you'd just pile it up. He was
quite innocent--calamitously innocent and commercial and awful in his
views. Thoughts such as these had been crammed into his brain by life
ever since he had gone down the staircase of the Brooklyn tenement
with his twenty-five cents in his ten-year-old hand.
The stillness of the house seemed to have accentuated itself when he
returned to it. His sense of it let him down a little as he entered.
The library was like a tomb--a comfortable luxurious tomb with a
bright fire in it. A new Punch and the morning papers had been laid
upon a table earlier in the day, and he sat down to look at them.
"I guess about fifty-seven or eight of the hundred and thirty- six
hours have gone by," he said. "But, gee! ain't it lonesome!"
He sat so still trying to interest himself in "London Day by Day" in
the morning paper that the combination of his exercise in the fresh
air and the warmth of the fire made him drowsy. He leaned back in his
chair and closed his eyes without being aware that he did so. He was
on the verge of a doze.
He remained upon the verge for a few minutes, and then a soft,
rustling sound made him open his eyes.
An elderly little lady had timidly entered the room. She was neatly
dressed in an old-fashioned and far-from-new black silk dress, with a
darned lace collar and miniature brooch at her neck. She had also
thin, gray side-ringlets dangling against her cheeks from beneath a
small, black lace cap with pale-purple ribbons on it. She had most
evidently not expected to find any one in the room, and, having seen
Tembarom, gave a half-frightened cough.
"I--I beg your pardon," she faltered. "I really did not mean to
intrude--really."
Tembarom jumped up, awkward, but good-natured. Was she a kind of
servant who was a lady?
"Oh, that's all right," he said.
But she evidently did not feel that it was all right. She looked as
though she felt that she had been caught doing something wrong, and
must properly propitiate by apology.
"I'm so sorry. I thought you had gone out--Mr. Temple Barholm."
"I did go out--to take a walk; but I came in."
Having been discovered in her overt act, she evidently felt that duty
demanded some further ceremony from her. She approached him very
timidly, but with an exquisite, little elderly early-Victorian manner.
She was of the most astonishingly perfect type, though Tembarom was
not aware of the fact. The manner, a century earlier, would have
expressed itself in a curtsy.
"It is Mr. Temple Barholm, isn't it? " she inquired.
"Yes; it has been for the last few weeks," he answered, wondering why
she seemed so in awe of him and wishing she didn't.
"I ought to apologize for being here," she began.
"Say, don't, please!" he interrupted. "What I feel is, that it ought
to be up to me to apologize for being here."
She was really quite flurried and distressed.
"Oh, please, Mr. Temple Barholm!" she fluttered, proceeding to explain
hurriedly, as though he without doubt understood the situation. "I
should of course have gone away at once after the late Mr. Temple
Barholm died, but--but I really had nowhere to go--and was kindly
allowed to remain until about two months ago, when I went to make a
visit. I fully intended to remove my little belongings before you
arrived, but I was detained by illness and could not return until this
morning to pack up. I understood you were in the park, and I
remembered I had left my knitting-bag here." She glanced nervously
about the room, and seemed to catch sight of something on a remote
corner table. "Oh, there it is. May I take it?" she said, looking at
him appealingly. "It was a kind present from a dear lost friend, and--
and--" She paused, seeing his puzzled and totally non-comprehending
air. It was plainly the first moment it had dawned upon her that he
did not know what she was talking about. She took a small, alarmed
step toward him.
"Oh, I BEG your pardon," she exclaimed in delicate anguish. "I'm
afraid you don't know who I am. Perhaps Mr. Palford forgot to mention
me. Indeed, why should he mention me? There were so many more
important things. I am a sort of distant--VERY distant relation of
yours. My name is Alicia Temple Barholm."
Tembarom was relieved. But she actually hadn't made a move toward the
knitting-bag. She seemed afraid to do it until he gave her permission.
He walked over to the corner table and brought it to her, smiling
broadly.
"Here it is," he said. "I'm glad you left it. I'm very happy to be
acquainted with you, Miss Alicia."
He was glad just to see her looking up at him with her timid, refined,
intensely feminine appeal. Why she vaguely brought back something that
reminded him of Ann he could not have told. He knew nothing whatever
of types early-Victorian or late.
He took her hand, evidently to her greatest possible amazement, and
shook it heartily. She knew nothing whatever of the New York street
type, and it made her gasp for breath, but naturally with an allayed
terror.
"Gee!" he exclaimed whole-heartedly, "I'm glad to find out I've got a
relation. I thought I hadn't one in the world. Won't you sit down?" He
was drawing her toward his own easy-chair. But he really didn't know,
she was agitatedly thinking. She really must tell him. He seemed so
good tempered and--and DIFFERENT. She herself was not aware of the
enormous significance which lay in that word "different." There must
be no risk of her seeming to presume upon his lack of knowledge.
"It is MOST kind of you," she said with grateful emphasis, "but I
mustn't sit down and detain you. I can explain in a few words--if I
may."
He positively still held her hand in the oddest, natural, boyish way,
and before she knew what she was doing he had made her take the chair-
-quite MADE her.
"Well, just sit down and explain," he said. "I wish to thunder you
would detain me. Take all the time you like. I want to hear all about
it--honest Injun."
There was a cushion in the chair, and as he talked, he pulled it out
and began to arrange it behind her, still in the most natural and
matter-of-fact way--so natural and matter-of-fact, indeed, that its
very natural matter-of-factedness took her breath away.
"Is that fixed all right?" he asked.
Being a little lady, she could only accept his extraordinary
friendliness with grateful appreciation, though she could not help
fluttering a little in her bewilderment.
"Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Temple Barholm," she said.
He sat down on the square ottoman facing her, and leaned forward with
an air of making a frank confession.
"Guess what I was thinking to myself two minutes before you came in? I
was thinking, `Lord, I'm lonesome--just sick lonesome!' And then I
opened my eyes and looked-- and there was a relation! Hully gee! I
call that luck!"
"Dear me!" she said, shyly delighted. "DO you, Mr. Temple Barholm--
REALLY?"
Her formal little way of saying his name was like Ann's.
"Do I? I'm tickled to death. My mother died when I was ten, and I've
never had any women kin-folks."
"Poor bo--" She had nearly said "Poor boy!" and only checked the
familiarity just in time--" Poor Mr. Temple Barholm!"
"Say, what are we two to each other, anyhow?" He put it to her with
great interest.
"It is a very distant relationship, if it is one at all," she
answered. "You see, I was only a second cousin to the late Mr. Temple
Barholm, and I had not really the SLIGHTEST claim upon him." She
placed pathetic emphasis on the fact. "It was most generous of him to
be so kind to me. When my poor father died and I was left quite
penniless, he gave me a--a sort of home here."
"A sort of home?" Tembarom repeated.
"My father was a clergyman in VERY straitened circumstances. We had
barely enough to live upon--barely. He could leave me nothing. It
actually seemed as if I should have to starve --it did, indeed." There
was a delicate quiver in her voice. "And though the late Mr. Temple
Barholm had a great antipathy to ladies, he was so--so noble as to
send word to me that there were a hundred and fifty rooms in his
house, and that if I would keep out of his way I might live in one of
them."
"That was noble," commented her distant relative.
"Oh, yes, indeed, especially when one considers how he disliked the
opposite sex and what a recluse he was. He could not endure ladies. I
scarcely ever saw him. My room was in quite a remote wing of the
house, and I never went out if I knew he was in the park. I was most
careful. And when he died of course I knew I must go away."
Tembarom was watching her almost tenderly.
"Where did you go?"
"To a kind clergyman in Shropshire who thought he might help me."
"How was he going to do it?"
She answered with an effort to steady a somewhat lowered and
hesitating voice.
"There was near his parish a very nice--charity,"--her breath caught
itself pathetically,--"some most comfortable almshouses for decayed
gentlewomen. He thought he might be able to use his influence to get
me into one." She paused and smiled, but her small, wrinkled hands
held each other closely.
Tembarom looked away. He spoke as though to himself, and without
knowing that he was thinking aloud.
"Almshouses!" he said. "Wouldn't that jolt you!" He turned on her
again with a change to cheerful concern. "Say, that cushion of yours
ain't comfortable. I 'm going to get you another one." He jumped up
and, taking one from a sofa, began to arrange it behind her
dexterously.
"But I mustn't trouble you any longer. I must go, really," she said,
half rising nervously. He put a hand on her shoulder and made her sit
again.
"Go where?" he said. "Just lean back on that cushion, Miss Alicia. For
the next few minutes this is going to be MY funeral."
She was at once startled and uncomprehending. What an extraordinary
expression! What COULD it mean?
"F--funeral?" she stammered.
Suddenly he seemed somehow to have changed. He looked as serious as
though he was beginning to think out something all at once. What was
he going to say?
"That's New York slang," he answered. "It means that I want to explain
myself to you and ask a few questions."
"Certainly, certainly, Mr. Temple Barholm."
He leaned his back against the mantel, and went into the matter
practically.
"First off, haven't you ANY folks?" Then, answering her puzzled look,
added, "I mean relations."
Miss Alicia gently shook her head.
"No sisters or brothers or uncles or aunts or cousins?"
She shook her head again.
He hesitated a moment, putting his hands in his pockets and taking
them out again awkwardly as he looked down at her.
"Now here's where I'm up against it," he went on. "I don't want to be
too fresh or to butt in, but--didn't old Temple Barholm leave you ANY
money?"
"Oh, no!" she exclaimed. "Dear me! no! I couldn't possibly EXPECT such
a thing."
He gazed at her as though considering the situation. "Couldn't you?"
he said.
There was an odd reflection in his eyes, and he seemed to consider her
and the situation again.
"Well," he began after his pause, "what I want to know is what you
expect ME to do."
There was no unkindness in his manner, in fact, quite the contrary,
even when he uttered what seemed to Miss Alicia these awful,
unwarranted words. As though she had forced herself into his presence
to make demands upon his charity! They made her tremble and turn pale
as she got up quickly, shocked and alarmed.
"Oh, nothing! nothing! nothing WHATEVER, Mr. Temple Barholm!" she
exclaimed, her agitation doing its best to hide itself behind a fine
little dignity. He saw in an instant that his style of putting it had
been "'way off," that his ignorance had betrayed him, that she had
misunderstood him altogether. He almost jumped at her.
"Oh, say, I didn't mean THAT!" he cried out. "For the Lord's sake!
don't think I'm such a Tenderloin tough as to make a break like that!
Not on your life!"
Never since her birth had a male creature looked at Miss Alicia with
the appeal which showed itself in his eyes as he actually put his arm
half around her shoulders, like a boy begging a favor from his mother
or his aunt.
"What I meant was--" He broke off and began again quite anxiously,
"say, just as a favor, will you sit down again and let me tell you
what I did mean?"
It was that natural, warm, boyish way which overcame her utterly. It
reminded her of the only boy she had ever really known, the one male
creature who had allowed her to be fond of him. There was moisture in
her eyes as she let him put her back into her chair. When he had done
it, he sat down on the ottoman again and poured himself forth.
"You know what kind of a chap I am. No, you don't, either. You mayn't
know a thing about me; and I want to tell you. I'm so different from
everything you've ever known that I scare you. And no wonder. It's the
way I've lived. If you knew, you'd understand what I was thinking of
when I spoke just now. I've been cold, I've been hungry, I've walked
the wet streets on my uppers. I know all about GOING WITHOUT. And do
you expect that I am going to let a--a little thing like you--go away
from here without friends and without money on the chance of getting
into an almshouse that isn't vacant? Do you expect that of me? Not on
your life! That was what I meant."
Miss Alicia quivered; the pale-purple ribbons on her little lace cap
quivered.
"I haven't," she said, and the fine little dignity was piteous, "a
SHADOW of a claim upon you." It was necessary for her to produce a
pocket- handkerchief. He took it from her, and touched her eyes as
softly as though she were a baby.
"Claim nothing!" he said. "I've got a claim on YOU. I'm going to stake
one out right now." He got up and gesticulated, taking in the big room
and its big furniture. "Look at all this! It fell on me like a
thunderbolt. It's nearly knocked the life out of me. I'm like a lost
cat on Broadway. You can't go away and leave me, Miss Alicia; it's
your duty to stay. You've just GOT to stay to take care of me." He
came over to her with a wheedling smile. "I never was taken care of in
my life. Just be as noble to me as old Temple Barholm was to you: give
me a sort of home."
If a little gentlewoman could stare, it might be said that Miss Alicia
stared at him. She trembled with amazed emotion.
"Do you mean--" Despite all he had said, she scarcely dared to utter
the words lest, after all, she might be taking for granted more than
it was credible could be true. "Can you mean that if I stayed here
with you it would make Temple Barholm seem more like HOME? Is it
possible you--you mean THAT?"
"I mean just that very thing."
It was too much for her. Finely restrained little elderly gentlewoman
as she was, she openly broke down under it.
"It can't be true!" she ejaculated shakily. "It isn't possible. It is
too--too beautiful and kind. Do forgive me! I c-a-n't help it." She
burst into tears.
She knew it was most stupidly wrong. She knew gentlemen did not like
tears. Her father had told her that men never really forgave women who
cried at them. And here, when her fate hung in the balance, she was
not able to behave herself with feminine decorum.
Yet the new Mr. Temple Barholm took it in as matter-of- fact a manner
as he seemed to take everything. He stood by her chair and soothed her
in his dear New York voice.
"That's all right, Miss Alicia," he commented. "You cry as much as you
want to, just so that you don't say no. You've been worried and you're
tired. I'll tell you there's been two or three times lately when I
should like to have cried myself if I'd known how. Say," he added with
a sudden outburst of imagination, "I bet anything it's about time you
had tea."
The suggestion was so entirely within the normal order of things that
it made her feel steadier, and she was able to glance at the clock.
"A cup of tea would be refreshing," she said. "They will bring it in
very soon, but before the servants come I must try to express--"
But before she could express anything further the tea appeared.
Burrill and a footman brought it on splendid salvers, in massive urn
and tea-pot, with chaste, sacrificial flame flickering, and wonderful,
hot buttered and toasted things and wafers of bread and butter
attendant. As they crossed the threshold, the sight of Miss Alicia's
small form enthroned in their employer's chair was one so obviously
unanticipated that Burrill made a step backward and the footman almost
lost the firmness of his hold on the smaller tray. Each recovered
himself in time, however, and not until the tea was arranged upon the
table near the fire was any outward recognition of Miss Alicia's
presence made. Then Burrill, pausing, made an announcement entirely
without prejudice:
"I beg pardon, sir, but Higgins's cart has come for Miss Temple
Barholm's box; he is asking when she wants the trap."
"She doesn't want it at all," answered Tembarom. "Carry her trunk up-
stairs again. She's not going away."
The lack of proper knowledge contained in the suggestion that Burrill
should carry trunks upstairs caused Miss Alicia to quail in secret,
but she spoke with outward calm.
"No, Burrill," she said. "I am not going away."
"Very good, Miss," Burrill replied, and with impressive civility he
prepared to leave the room. Tembarom glanced at the tea-things.
"There's only one cup here," he said. "Bring one for me."
Burrill's expression might perhaps have been said to start slightly.
"Very good, sir," he said, and made his exit. Miss Alicia was
fluttering again.
"That cup was really for you, Mr. Temple Barholm," she ventured.
"Well, now it's for you, and I've let him know it," replied Tembarom.
"Oh, PLEASE," she said in an outburst of feeling--"PLEASE let me tell
you how GRATEFUL--how grateful I am!"
But he would not let her.
"If you do," he said, "I'll tell you how grateful _I_ am, and that'll
be worse. No, that's all fixed up between us. It goes. We won't say
any more about it."
He took the whole situation in that way, as though he was assuming no
responsibility which was not the simple, inevitable result of their
drifting across each other--as though it was only what any man would
have done, even as though she was a sort of delightful, unexpected
happening. He turned to the tray.
"Say, that looks all right, doesn't it?" he said. "Now you are here, I
like the way it looks. I didn't yesterday."
Burrill himself brought the extra cup and saucer and plate. He wished
to make sure that his senses had not deceived him. But there she sat
who through years had existed discreetly in the most unconsidered
rooms in an uninhabited wing, knowing better than to presume upon her
privileges--there she sat with an awed and rapt face gazing up at this
new outbreak into Temple Barholm's and "him joking and grinning as
though he was as pleased as Punch."
CHAPTER XV
To employ the figure of Burrill, Tembarom was indeed "as pleased as
Punch." He was one of the large number of men who, apart from all
sentimental relations, are made particularly happy by the kindly
society of women; who expand with quite unconscious rejoicing when a
woman begins to take care of them in one way or another. The
unconsciousness is a touching part of the condition. The feminine
nearness supplies a primeval human need. The most complete of men, as
well as the weaklings, feel it. It is a survival of days when warm
arms held and protected, warm hands served, and affectionate voices
soothed. An accomplished male servant may perform every domestic
service perfectly, but the fact that he cannot be a woman leaves a
sense of lack. An accustomed feminine warmth in the surrounding daily
atmosphere has caused many a man to marry his housekeeper or even his
cook, as circumstances prompted.
Tembarom had known no woman well until he had met Little Ann. His
feeling for Mrs. Bowse herself had verged on affection, because he
would have been fond of any woman of decent temper and kindliness,
especially if she gave him opportunities to do friendly service.
Little Ann had seemed the apotheosis of the feminine, the warmly
helpful, the subtly supporting, the kind. She had been to him an
amazement and a revelation. She had continually surprised him by
revealing new characteristics which seemed to him nicer things than he
had ever known before, but which, if he had been aware of it, were not
really surprising at all. They were only the characteristics of a very
nice young feminine creature.
The presence of Miss Alicia, with the long-belated fashion of her
ringlets and her little cap, was delightful to him. He felt as though
he would like to take her in his arms and hug her. He thought perhaps
it was partly because she was a little like Ann, and kept repeating
his name in Ann's formal little way. Her delicate terror of presuming
or intruding he felt in its every shade. Mentally she touched him
enormously. He wanted to make her feel that she need not be afraid of
him in the least, that he liked her, that in his opinion she had more
right in the house than he had. He was a little frightened lest
through ignorance he should say things the wrong way, as he had said
that thing about wanting to know what she expected him to do. What he
ought to have said was, "You're not expecting me to let that sort of
thing go on." It had made him sick when he saw what a break he'd made
and that she thought he was sort of insulting her. The room seemed all
right now that she was in it. Small and unassuming as she was, she
seemed to make it less over-sized. He didn't so much mind the
loftiness of the ceiling, the depth and size of the windows, and the
walls covered with thousands of books he knew nothing whatever about.
The innumerable books had been an oppressing feature. If he had been
one of those "college guys" who never could get enough of books, what
a "cinch" the place would have been for him--good as the Astor
Library! He hadn't a word to say against books,--good Lord! no;--but
even if he'd had the education and the time to read, he didn't believe
he was naturally that kind, anyhow. You had to be "that kind" to know
about books. He didn't suppose she-- meaning Miss Alicia--was learned
enough to make you throw a fit. She didn't look that way, and he was
mighty glad of it, because perhaps she wouldn't like him much if she
was. It would worry her when she tried to talk to him and found out he
didn't know a darned thing he ought to.
They'd get on together easier if they could just chin about common
sort of every-day things. But though she didn't look like the Vassar
sort, he guessed that she was not like himself: she had lived in
libraries before, and books didn't frighten her. She'd been born among
people who read lots of them and maybe could talk about them. That was
why she somehow seemed to fit into the room. He was aware that, timid
as she was and shabby as her neat dress looked, she fitted into the
whole place, as he did not. She'd been a poor relative and had been
afraid to death of old Temple Barholm, but she'd not been afraid of
him because she wasn't his sort. She was a lady; that was what was the
matter with her. It was what made things harder for her, too. It was
what made her voice tremble when she'd tried to seem so contented and
polite when she'd talked about going into one of those "decayed alms-
houses." As if the old ladies were vegetables that had gone wrong, by
gee! he thought.
He liked her little, modest, delicate old face and her curls and her
little cap with the ribbons so much that he smiled with a twinkling
eye every time he looked at her. He wanted to suggest something he
thought would be mighty comfortable, but he was half afraid he might
be asking her to do something which wasn't "her job," and it might
hurt her feelings. But he ventured to hint at it.
"Has Burrill got to come back and pour that out?" he asked, with an
awkward gesture toward the tea-tray. "Has he just GOT to?"
"Oh, no, unless you wish it," she answered. "Shall--may I give it to
you?"
"Will you?" he exclaimed delightedly. "That would be fine. I shall
feel like a regular Clarence."
She was going to sit at the table in a straight-backed chair, but he
sprang at her.
"This big one is more comfortable," he said, and he dragged it forward
and made her sit in it. "You ought to have a footstool," he added, and
he got one and put it under her feet. "There, that's all right."
A footstool, as though she were a royal personage and he were a
gentleman in waiting, only probably gentlemen in waiting did not jump
about and look so pleased. The cheerful content of his boyish face
when he himself sat down near the table was delightful.
"Now," he said, "we can ring up for the first act."
She filled the tea-pot and held it for a moment, and then set it down
as though her feelings were too much for her.
"I feel as if I were in a dream," she quavered happily. "I do indeed."
"But it's a nice one, ain't it? " he answered. "I feel as if I was in
two. Sitting here in this big room with all these fine things about
me, and having afternoon tea with a relation! It just about suits me.
It didn't feel like this yesterday, you bet your life!"
"Does it seem--nicer than yesterday?" she ventured. "Really, Mr.
Temple Barholm?"
"Nicer!" he ejaculated. "It's got yesterday beaten to a frazzle."
It was beyond all belief. He was speaking as though the advantage, the
relief, the happiness, were all on his side. She longed to enlighten
him.
"But you can't realize what it is to me," she said gratefully, "to sit
here, not terrified and homeless and--a beggar any more, with your
kind face before me. Do forgive me for saying it. You have such a kind
young face, Mr. Temple Barholm. And to have an easy-chair and
cushions, and actually a buffet brought for my feet! " She suddenly
recollected herself. "Oh, I mustn't let your tea get cold," she added,
taking up the tea-pot apologetically. "Do you take cream and sugar,
and is it to be one lump or two?"
"I take everything in sight," he replied joyously, "and two lumps,
please."
She prepared the cup of tea with as delicate a care as though it had
been a sacramental chalice, and when she handed it to him she smiled
wistfully.
"No one but you ever thought of such a thing as bringing a buffet for
my feet--no one except poor little Jem," she said, and her voice was
wistful as well as her smile.
She was obviously unaware that she was introducing an entirely new
acquaintance to him. Poor little Jem was supposed to be some one whose
whole history he knew.
"Jem?" he repeated, carefully transferring a piece of hot buttered
crumpet to his plate.
"Jem Temple Barholm," she answered. "I say little Jem because I
remember him only as a child. I never saw him after he was eleven
years old."
"Who was he?" he asked. The tone of her voice, and her manner of
speaking made him feel that he wanted to hear something more.
She looked rather startled by his ignorance. "Have you-- have you
never heard of him?" she inquired.
"No. Is he another distant relation?"
Her hesitation caused him to neglect his crumpet, to look up at her.
He saw at once that she wore the air of a sensitive and beautifully
mannered elderly lady who was afraid she had made a mistake and said
something awkward.
"I am so sorry," she apologized. "Perhaps I ought not to have
mentioned him."
"Why shouldn't he be mentioned?"
She was embarrassed. She evidently wished she had not spoken, but
breeding demanded that she should ignore the awkwardness of the
situation, if awkwardness existed.
"Of course--I hope your tea is quite as you like it--of course there
is no real reason. But--shall I give you some more cream? No? You see,
if he hadn't died, he--he would have inherited Temple Barholm."
Now he was interested. This was the other chap.
"Instead of me?" he asked, to make sure. She endeavored not to show
embarrassment and told herself it didn't really matter--to a
thoroughly nice person. But--
"He was the next of kin--before you. I'm so sorry I didn't know you
hadn't heard of him. It seemed natural that Mr. Palford should have
mentioned him."
"He did say that there was a young fellow who had died, but he didn't
tell me about him. I guess I didn't ask. There were such a lot of
other things. I'd like to hear about him. You say you knew him?"
"Only when he was a little fellow. Never after he grew up. Something
happened which displeased my father. I'm afraid papa was very easily
displeased. Mr. Temple Barholm disliked him, too. He would not have
him at Temple Barholm."
"He hadn't much luck with his folks, had he?" remarked Tembarom.
"He had no luck with any one. I seemed to be the only person who was
fond of him, and of course I didn't count."
"I bet you counted with him," said Tembarom.
"I do think I did. Both his parents died quite soon after he was born,
and people who ought to have cared for him were rather jealous because
he stood so near to Temple Barholm. If Mr. Temple Barholm had not been
so eccentric and bitter, everything would have been done for him; but
as it was, he seemed to belong to no one. When he came to the vicarage
it used to make me so happy. He used to call me Aunt Alicia, and he
had such pretty ways." She hesitated and looked quite tenderly at the
tea-pot, a sort of shyness in her face. "I am sure," she burst forth,
"I feel quite sure that you will understand and won't think it
indelicate; but I had thought so often that I should like to have a
little boy--if I had married," she added in hasty tribute to
propriety.
Tembarom's eyes rested on her in a thoughtfulness openly touched with
affection. He put out his hand and patted hers two or three times in
encouraging sympathy.
"Say," he said frankly, "I just believe every woman that's the real
thing'd like to have a little boy--or a little girl--or a little
something or other. That's why pet cats and dogs have such a cinch of
it. And there's men that's the same way. It's sort of nature."
"He had such a high spirit and such pretty ways," she said again. "One
of his pretty ways was remembering to do little things to make one
comfortable, like thinking of giving one a cushion or a buffet for
one's feet. I noticed it so much because I had never seen boys or men
wait upon women. My own dear papa was used to having women wait upon
him--bring his slippers, you know, and give him the best chair. He
didn't like Jem's ways. He said he liked a boy who was a boy and not
an affected nincompoop. He wasn't really quite just." She paused
regretfully and sighed as she looked back into a past doubtlessly
enriched with many similar memories of "dear papa." "Poor Jem! Poor
Jem!" she breathed softly.
Tembarom thought that she must have felt the boy's loss very much,
almost as much as though she had really been his mother; perhaps more
pathetically because she had not been his mother or anybody's mother.
He could see what a good little mother she would have made, looking
after her children and doing everything on earth to make them happy
and comfortable, just the kind of mother Ann would make, though she
had not Ann's steady wonder of a little head or her shrewd
farsightedness. Jem would have been in luck if he had been her son. It
was a darned pity he hadn't been. If he had, perhaps he would not have
died young.
"Yes," he answered sympathetically, "it's hard for a young fellow to
die. How old was he, anyhow? I don't know."
"Not much older than you are now. It was seven years ago. And if he
had only died, poor dear! There are things so much worse than death."
"Worse!"
"Awful disgrace is worse," she faltered. She was plainly trying to
keep moisture out of her eyes.
"Did he get into some bad mix-up, poor fellow?" If there had been
anything like that, no wonder it broke her up to think of him.
It surely did break her up. She flushed emotionally.
"The cruel thing was that he didn't really do what he was accused of,"
she said.
"He didn't?"
"No; but he was a ruined man, and he went away to the Klondike because
he could not stay in England. And he was killed--killed, poor boy! And
afterward it was found out that he was innocent--too late."
"Gee!" Tembarom gasped, feeling hot and cold. "Could you beat that for
rotten luck! What was he accused of?"
Miss Alicia leaned forward and spoke in a whisper. It was too dreadful
to speak of aloud.
"Cheating at cards--a gentleman playing with gentlemen. You know what
that means."
Tembarom grew hotter and colder. No wonder she looked that way, poor
little thing!
"But,"--he hesitated before he spoke,--"but he wasn't that kind, was
he? Of course he wasn't."
"No, no. But, you see,"--she hesitated herself here,--"everything
looked so much against him. He had been rather wild." She dropped her
voice even lower in making the admission.
Tembarom wondered how much she meant by that.
"He was so much in debt. He knew he was to be rich in the future, and
he was poor just in those reckless young days when it seemed unfair.
And he had played a great deal and had been very lucky. He was so
lucky that sometimes his luck seemed uncanny. Men who had played with
him were horrible about it afterward."
"They would be," put in Tembarom. " They'd be sore about it, and bring
it up."
They both forgot their tea. Miss Alicia forgot everything as she
poured forth her story in the manner of a woman who had been forced to
keep silent and was glad to put her case into words. It was her case.
To tell the truth of this forgotten wrong was again to offer
justification of poor handsome Jem whom everybody seemed to have
dropped talk of, and even preferred not to hear mentioned.
"There were such piteously cruel things about it," she went on. "He
had fallen very much in love, and he meant to marry and settle down.
Though we had not seen each other for years, he actually wrote to me
and told me about it. His letter made me cry. He said I would
understand and care about the thing which seemed to have changed
everything and made him a new man. He was so sorry that he had not
been better and more careful. He was going to try all over again. He
was not going to play at all after this one evening when he was
obliged to keep an engagement he had made months before to give his
revenge to a man he had won a great deal of money from. The very night
the awful thing happened he had told Lady Joan, before he went into
the card-room, that this was to be his last game."
Tembarom had looked deeply interested from the first, but at her last
words a new alertness added itself.
"Did you say Lady Joan? " he asked. " Who was Lady Joan?"
"She was the girl he was so much in love with. Her name was Lady Joan
Fayre."
"Was she the daughter of the Countess of Mallowe?"
"Yes. Have you heard of her?"
He recalled Ann's reflective consideration of him before she had said,
"She'll come after you." He replied now: "Some one spoke of her to me
this morning. They say she's a beauty and as proud as Lucifer."
"She was, and she is yet, I believe. Poor Lady Joan--as well as poor
Jem!"
"She didn't believe it, did she?" he put in hastily. "She didn't throw
him down?"
"No one knew what happened between them afterward. She was in the
card-room, looking on, when the awful thing took place."
She stopped, as though to go on was almost unbearable. She had been so
overwhelmed by the past shame of it that even after the passing of
years the anguish was a living thing. Her small hands clung hard
together as they rested on the edge of the table. Tembarom waited in
thrilled suspense. She spoke in a whisper again:
"He won a great deal of money--a great deal. He had that uncanny luck
again, and of course people in the other rooms heard what was going
on, and a number drifted in to look on. The man he had promised to
give his revenge to almost showed signs of having to make an effort to
conceal his irritation and disappointment. Of course, as he was a
gentleman, he was as cool as possible; but just at the most exciting
moment, the height of the game, Jem made a quick movement, and--and
something fell out of his sleeve."
"Something," gasped Tembarom, "fell out of his sleeve!"
Miss Alicia's eyes overflowed as she nodded her beribboned little cap.
"It"--her voice was a sob of woe--"it was a marked card. The man he
was playing against snatched it and held it up. And he laughed out
loud."
"Holy cats! " burst from Tembarom; but the remarkable exclamation was
one of genuine horror, and he turned pale, got up from his seat, and
took two or three strides across the room, as though he could not sit
still.
"Yes, he laughed--quite loudly," repeated Miss Alicia, "as if he had
guessed it all the time. Papa heard the whole story from some one who
was present."
Tembarom came back to her rather breathless.
"What in thunder did he do--Jem?" he asked.
She actually wrung her poor little hands.
"What could he do? There was a dead silence. People moved just a
little nearer to the table and stood and stared, merely waiting. They
say it was awful to see his face--awful. He sprang up and stood still,
and slowly became as white as if he were dying before their eyes. Some
one thought Lady Joan Fayre took a step toward him, but no one was
quite sure. He never uttered one word, but walked out of the room and
down the stairs and out of the house."
"But didn't he speak to the girl?"
"He didn't even look at her. He passed her by as if she were stone."
"What happened next?"
"He disappeared. No one knew where at first, and then there was a
rumor that he had gone to the Klondike and had been killed there. And
a year later--only a year! Oh, if he had only waited in England!--a
worthless villain of a valet he had discharged for stealing met with
an accident, and because he thought he was going to die, got horribly
frightened, and confessed to the clergyman that he had tucked the card
in poor Jem's sleeve himself just to pay him off. He said he did it on
the chance that it would drop out where some one would see it, and a
marked card dropping out of a man's sleeve anywhere would look black
enough, whether he was playing or not. But poor Jem was in his grave,
and no one seemed to care, though every one had been interested enough
in the scandal. People talked about that for weeks."
Tembarom pulled at his collar excitedly.
"It makes me sort of strangle," he said. "You've got to stand your own
bad luck, but to hear of a chap that's had to lie down and take the
worst that could come to him and know it wasn't his--just KNOW it! And
die before he's cleared! That knocks me out."
Almost every sentence he uttered had a mystical sound to Miss Alicia,
but she knew how he was taking it, with what hot, young human sympathy
and indignation. She loved the way he took it, and she loved the
feeling in his next words
"And the girl--good Lord!--the girl?"
"I never met her, and I know very little of her; but she has never
married."
"I'm glad of that," he said. "I'm darned glad of it. How could she?"
Ann wouldn't, he knew. Ann would have gone to her grave unmarried. But
she would have done things first to clear her man's name. Somehow she
would have cleared him, if she'd had to fight tooth and nail till she
was eighty.
"They say she has grown very bitter and haughty in her manner. I'm
afraid Lady Mallowe is a very worldly woman. One hears they don't get
on together, and that she is bitterly disappointed because her
daughter has not made a good match. It appears that she might have
made several, but she is so hard and cynical that men are afraid of
her. I wish I had known her a little--if she really loved Jem."
Tembarom had thrust his hands into his pockets, and was standing deep
in thought, looking at the huge bank of red coals in the fire-grate.
Miss Alicia hastily wiped her eyes.
"Do excuse me," she said.
"I'll excuse you all right," he replied, still looking into the coals.
"I guess I shouldn't excuse you as much if you didn't" He let her cry
in her gentle way while he stared, lost in reflection.
"And if he hadn't fired that valet chap, he would be here with you
now--instead of me. Instead of me," he repeated.
And Miss Alicia did not know what to say in reply. There seemed to be
nothing which, with propriety and natural feeling, one could say.
"It makes me feel just fine to know I'm not going to have my dinner
all by myself," he said to her before she left the library.
She had a way of blushing about things he noticed, when she was shy or
moved or didn't know exactly what to say. Though she must have been
sixty, she did it as though she were sixteen. And she did it when he
said this, and looked as though suddenly she was in some sort of
trouble.
"You are going to have dinner with me," he said, seeing that she
hesitated--"dinner and breakfast and lunch and tea and supper and
every old thing that goes. You can't turn me down after me staking out
that claim."
"I'm afraid--" she said. "You see, I have lived such a secluded life.
I scarcely ever left my rooms except to take a walk. I'm sure you
understand. It would not have been necessary even if I could have
afforded it, which I really couldn't--I'm afraid I have nothing--
quite suitable--for evening wear."
"You haven't!" he exclaimed gleefully. "I don't know what is suitable
for evening wear, but I haven't got it either. Pearson told me so with
tears in his eyes. It never was necessary for me either. I've got to
get some things to quiet Pearson down, but until I do I've got to eat
my dinner in a tweed cutaway; and what I've caught on to is that it's
unsuitable enough to throw a man into jail. That little black dress
you've got on and that little cap are just 'way out of sight, they're
so becoming. Come down just like you are."
She felt a little as Pearson had felt when confronting his new
employer's entire cheerfulness in face of a situation as exotically
hopeless as the tweed cutaway, and nothing else by way of resource.
But there was something so nice about him, something which was almost
as though he was actually a gentleman, something which absolutely, if
one could go so far, stood in the place of his being a gentleman. It
was impossible to help liking him more and more at every queer speech
he made. Still, there were of course things he did not realize, and
perhaps one ought in kindness to give him a delicate hint.
"I'm afraid," she began quite apologetically. "I'm afraid that the
servants, Burrill and the footmen, you know, will be--will think--"
"Say," he took her up, " let's give Burrill and the footmen the
Willies out and out. If they can't stand it, they can write home to
their mothers and tell 'em they've got to take 'em away. Burrill and
the footmen needn't worry. They're suitable enough, and it's none of
their funeral, anyhow."
He wasn't upset in the least. Miss Alicia, who, as a timid dependent
either upon "poor dear papa" or Mr. Temple Barholm, had been secretly,
in her sensitive, ladylike little way, afraid of superior servants all
her life, knowing that they realized her utterly insignificant
helplessness, and resented giving her attention because she was not
able to show her appreciation of their services in the proper manner--
Miss Alicia saw that it had not occurred to him to endeavor to
propitiate them in the least, because somehow it all seemed a joke to
him, and he didn't care. After the first moment of being startled, she
regarded him with a novel feeling, almost a kind of admiration.
Tentatively she dared to wonder if there was not something even
rather--rather ARISTOCRATIC in his utter indifference.
If be had been a duke, he would not have regarded the servants' point
of view; it wouldn't have mattered what they thought. Perhaps, she
hastily decided, he was like this because, though he was not a duke,
boot-blacking in New York notwithstanding he was a Temple Barholm.
There were few dukes as old of blood as a Temple Barholm. That must be
it. She was relieved.
Whatsoever lay at the root of his being what he was and as he was, he
somehow changed the aspect of things for her, and without doing
anything but be himself, cleared the atmosphere of her dread of the
surprise and mental reservations of the footmen and Burrill when she
came down to dinner in her high-necked, much-cleaned, and much-
repaired black silk, and with no more distinguishing change in her
toilet than a white lace cap instead of a black one, and with "poor
dear mamma's" hair bracelet with the gold clasp on her wrist, and a
weeping-willow made of "poor dear papa's" hair in a brooch at her
collar.
It was so curious, though still "nice," but he did not offer her his
arm when they were going into the dining-room, and he took hold of
hers with his hand and affectionately half led, half pushed, her along
with him as they went. And he himself drew back her chair for her at
the end of the table opposite his own. He did not let a footman do it,
and he stood behind it, talking in his cheerful way all the time, and
he moved it to exactly the right place, and then actually bent down
and looked under the table.
"Here," he said to the nearest man-servant, "where's there a
footstool? Get one, please," in that odd, simple, almost aristocratic
way. It was not a rude dictatorial way, but a casual way, as though he
knew the man was there to do things, and he didn't expect any time to
be wasted.
And it was he himself who arranged the footstool, making it
comfortable for her, and then he went to his own chair at the head of
the table and sat down, smiling at her joyfully across the glass and
silver and flowers.
"Push that thing in the middle on one side, Burrill," he said. "It's
too high. I can't see Miss Alicia."
Burrill found it difficult to believe the evidence of his hearing.
"The epergne, sir? " he inquired.
"Is that what it's called, an apern? That's a new one on me. Yes,
that's what I mean. Push the apern over."
"Shall I remove it from the table, sir?" Burrill steeled himself to
exact civility. Of what use to behave otherwise? There always remained
the liberty to give notice if the worst came to the worst, though what
the worst might eventually prove to be it required a lurid imagination
to depict. The epergne was a beautiful thing of crystal and gold, a
celebrated work of art, regarded as an exquisite possession. It was
almost remarkable that Mr. Temple Barholm had not said, "Shove it on
one side," but Burrill had been spared the poignant indignity of being
required to "shove."
"Yes, suppose you do. It's a fine enough thing when it isn't in the
way, but I've got to see you while I talk, Miss Alicia," said Mr.
Temple Barholm. The episode of the epergne-- Burrill's expression, and
the rigidly restrained mouths of Henry and James as the decoration was
removed, leaving a painfully blank space of table-cloth until Burrill
silently filled it with flowers in a low bowl--these things
temporarily flurried Miss Alicia somewhat, but the pleased smile at
the head of the table calmed even that trying moment.
Then what a delightful meal it was, to be sure! How entertaining and
cheerful and full of interesting conversation! Miss Alicia had always
admired what she reverently termed "conversation." She had read of the
houses of brilliant people where they had it at table, at dinner and
supper parties, and in drawing-rooms. The French, especially the
French ladies, were brilliant conversationalists. They held "salons"
in which the conversation was wonderful--Mme. de Stael and Mme.
Roland, for instance; and in England, Lady Mary Wortley Montague,
Sydney Smith, and Horace Walpole, and surely Miss Fanny Burney, and no
doubt L. E. L., whose real name was Miss Letitia Elizabeth Landon--
what conversation they must have delighted their friends with and how
instructive it must have been even to sit in the most obscure corner
and listen!
Such gifted persons seemed to have been chosen by Providence to
delight and inspire every one privileged to hear them. Such privileges
had been omitted from the scheme of Miss Alicia's existence. She did
not know, she would have felt it sacrilegious to admit it even if the
fact had dawned upon her, that "dear papa" had been a heartlessly
arrogant, utterly selfish, and tyrannical old blackguard of the most
pronounced type. He had been of an absolute morality as far as social
laws were concerned. He had written and delivered a denunciatory
sermon a week, and had made unbearable by his ministrations the
suffering hours and the last moments of his parishioners during the
long years of his pastorate. When Miss Alicia, in reading records of
the helpful relationship of the male progenitors of the Brontes, Jane
Austen, Fanny Burney, and Mrs. Browning, was frequently reminded of
him, she revealed a perception of which she was not aware. He had
combined the virile qualities of all of them. Consequently, brilliancy
of conversation at table had not been the attractive habit of the
household; "poor dear papa" had confined himself to scathing criticism
of the incompetence of females who could not teach their menials to
"cook a dinner which was not a disgrace to any decent household." When
not virulently aspersing the mutton, he was expressing his opinion of
muddle-headed weakness which would permit household bills to mount in
a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of
the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped
his intellectual manhood in the useless effort to support in silly
idleness a family of brainless and maddening fools. Miss Alicia had
heard her character, her unsuccessful physical appearance, her mind,
and her pitiful efforts at table-talk, described in detail with a
choice of adjective and adverb which had broken into terrified
fragments every atom of courage and will with which she had been
sparsely dowered.
So, not having herself been gifted with conversational powers to begin
with, and never having enjoyed the exhibition of such powers in
others, her ideals had been high. She was not sure that Mr. Temple
Barholm's fluent and cheerful talk could be with exactness termed
"conversation." It was perhaps not sufficiently lofty and
intellectual, and did not confine itself rigorously to one exalted
subject. But how it did raise one's spirits and open up curious
vistas! And how good tempered and humorous it was, even though
sometimes the humor was a little bewildering! During the whole dinner
there never occurred even one of those dreadful pauses in which dead
silence fell, and one tried, like a frightened hen flying from side to
side of a coop, to think of something to say which would not sound
silly, but perhaps might divert attention from dangerous topics. She
had often thought it would be so interesting to hear a Spaniard or a
native Hindu talk about himself and his own country in English.
Tembarom talked about New York and its people and atmosphere, and he
did not know how foreign it all was. He described the streets--Fifth
Avenue and Broadway and Sixth Avenue--and the street-cars and the
elevated railroad, and the way "fellows" had to "hustle" "to put it
over." He spoke of a boarding-house kept by a certain Mrs. Bowse, and
a presidential campaign, and the election of a mayor, and a quick-
lunch counter, and when President Garfield had been assassinated, and
a department store; and the electric lights, and the way he had of
making a sort of picture of everything was really instructive and,
well, fascinating. She felt as though she had been taken about the
city in one of the vehicles the conductor of which described things
through a megaphone.
Not that Mr. Temple Barholm suggested a megaphone, whatsoever that
might be, but he merely made you feel as if you had seen things. Never
had she been so entertained and enlightened. If she had been a
beautiful girl, he could not have seemed more as though in amusing her
he was also really pleasing himself. He was so very funny sometimes
that she could not help laughing in a way which was almost unladylike,
because she could not stop, and was obliged to put her handkerchief up
to her face and wipe away actual tears of mirth.
Fancy laughing until you cried, and the servants looking on!
Once Burrill himself was obliged to turn hastily away, and twice she
heard him severely reprove an overpowered young footman in a rapid
undertone.
Tembarom at least felt that the unlifting heaviness of atmosphere
which had surrounded him while enjoying the companionship of Mr.
Palford was a thing of the past.
The thrilled interest, the surprise and delight of Miss Alicia would
have stimulated a man in a comatose condition, it seemed to him. The
little thing just loved every bit of it--she just "eat it up." She
asked question after question, sometimes questions which would have
made him shout with laughter if he had not been afraid of hurting her
feelings. She knew as little of New York as he knew of Temple Barholm,
and was, it made him grin to see, allured by it as by some illicit
fascination. She did not know what to make of it, and sometimes she
was obliged hastily to conceal a fear that it was a sort of Sodom and
Gomorrah; but she wanted to hear more about it, and still more.
And she brightened up until she actually did not look frightened, and
ate her dinner with an excellent appetite.
"I really never enjoyed a dinner so much in my life," she said when
they went into the drawing-room to have their coffee. "It was the
conversation which made it so delightful. Conversation is such a
stimulating thing!"
She had almost decided that it was "conversation," or at least a
wonderful substitute.
When she said good night to him and went beaming to bed, looking
forward immensely to breakfast next morning, he watched her go up the
staircase, feeling wonderfully normal and happy.
"Some of these nights, when she's used to me," he said as he stuffed
tobacco into his last pipe in the library--"some of these nights I'm
darned if I sha'n't catch hold of the sweet, little old thing and hug
her in spite of myself. I sha'n't be able to help it." He lit his
pipe, and puffed it even excitedly. "Lord!" he said, "there's some
blame' fool going about the world right now that might have married
her. And he'll never know what a break he made when he didn't."
CHAPTER XVI
A fugitive fine day which had strayed into the month from the
approaching spring appeared the next morning, and Miss Alicia was
uplifted by the enrapturing suggestion that she should join her new
relative in taking a walk, in fact that it should be she who took him
to walk and showed him some of his possessions. This, it had revealed
itself to him, she could do in a special way of her own, because
during her life at Temple Barholm she had felt it her duty to "try to
do a little good" among the villagers. She and her long-dead mother
and sister had of course been working adjuncts of the vicarage, and
had numerous somewhat trying tasks to perform in the way of improving
upon "dear papa's" harrying them into attending church, chivying the
mothers into sending their children to Sunday-school, and being
unsparing in severity of any conduct which might be construed into
implying lack of appreciation of the vicar or respect for his
eloquence.
It had been necessary for them as members of the vicar's family--
always, of course, without adding a sixpence to the household bills--
to supply bowls of nourishing broth and arrowroot to invalids and to
bestow the aid and encouragement which result in a man of God's being
regarded with affection and gratitude by his parishioners. Many a
man's career in the church, "dear papa" had frequently observed, had
been ruined by lack of intelligence and effort on the part of the
female members of his family.
"No man could achieve proper results," he had said, "if he was
hampered by the selfish influence and foolishness of his womenkind.
Success in the church depends in one sense very much upon the conduct
of a man's female relatives."
After the deaths of her mother and sister, Miss Alicia had toiled on
patiently, fading day by day from a slim, plain, sweet-faced girl to a
slim, even plainer and sweeter-faced middle-aged and at last elderly
woman. She had by that time read aloud by bedsides a great many
chapters in the Bible, had given a good many tracts, and bestowed as
much arrowroot, barley-water, and beef-tea as she could possibly
encompass without domestic disaster. She had given a large amount of
conscientious, if not too intelligent, advice, and had never failed to
preside over her Sunday-school class or at mothers' meetings. But her
timid unimpressiveness had not aroused enthusiasm or awakened
comprehension. "Miss Alicia," the cottage women said, "she's well
meanin', but she's not one with a head." "She reminds me," one of them
had summed her up, "of a hen that lays a' egg every day, but it's too
small for a meal, and 'u'd never hatch into anythin'."
During her stay at Temple Barholm she had tentatively tried to do a
little "parish work," but she had had nothing to give, and she was
always afraid that if Mr. Temple Barholm found her out, he would be
angry, because he would think she was presuming. She was aware that
the villagers knew that she was an object of charity herself, and a
person who was "a lady" and yet an object of charity was, so to speak,
poaching upon their own legitimate preserves. The rector and his wife
were rather grand people, and condescended to her greatly on the few
occasions of their accidental meetings. She was neither smart nor
influential enough to be considered as an asset.
It was she who "conversed" during their walk, and while she trotted by
Tembarom's side looking more early-Victorian than ever in a neat,
fringed mantle and a small black bonnet of a fashion long decently
interred by a changing world, Tembarom had never seen anything
resembling it in New York; but he liked it and her increasingly at
every moment.
It was he who made her converse. He led her on by asking her questions
and being greatly interested in every response she made. In fact,
though he was quite unaware of the situation, she was creating for him
such an atmosphere as he might have found in a book, if he had had the
habit of books. Everything she told him was new and quaint and very
often rather touching. She related anecdotes about herself and her
poor little past without knowing she was doing it. Before they had
talked an hour he had an astonishing clear idea of "poor dear papa"
and "dearest Emily" and "poor darling mama" and existence at Rowcroft
Vicarage. He "caught on to" the fact that though she was very much
given to the word "dear,"--people were "dear," and so were things and
places,--she never even by chance slipped into saying "dear Rowcroft,"
which she would certainly have done if she had ever spent a happy
moment in it.
As she talked to him he realized that her simple accustomedness to
English village life and all its accompaniments of county surroundings
would teach him anything and everything he might want to know. Her
obscurity had been surrounded by stately magnificence, with which she
had become familiar without touching the merest outskirts of its
privileges. She knew names and customs and families and things to be
cultivated or avoided, and though she would be a little startled and
much mystified by his total ignorance of all she had breathed in since
her birth, he felt sure that she would not regard him either with
private contempt or with a lessened liking because he was a vandal
pure and simple.
And she had such a nice, little, old polite way of saying things.
When, in passing a group of children, he failed to understand that
their hasty bobbing up and down meant that they were doing obeisance
to him as lord of the manor, she spoke with the prettiest apologetic
courtesy.
"I'm sure you won't mind touching your hat when they make their little
curtsies, or when a villager touches his forehead," she said.
"Good Lord! no," he said, starting. "Ought I? I didn't know they were
doing it at me." And he turned round and made a handsome bow and
grinned almost affectionately at the small, amazed party, first
puzzling, and then delighting, them, because he looked so
extraordinarily friendly. A gentleman who laughed at you like that
ought to be equal to a miscellaneous distribution of pennies in the
future, if not on the spot. They themselves grinned and chuckled and
nudged one another, with stares and giggles.
"I am sorry to say that in a great many places the villagers are not
nearly so respectful as they used to be," Miss Alicia explained. "In
Rowcroft the children were very remiss about curtseying. It's quite
sad. But Mr. Temple Barholm was very strict indeed in the matter of
demanding proper respectfulness. He has turned men off their farms for
incivility. The villagers of Temple Barholm have much better manners
than some even a few miles away."
"Must I tip my hat to all of them?" he asked.
"If you please. It really seems kinder. You--you needn't quite lift
it, as you did to the children just now. If you just touch the brim
lightly with your hand in a sort of military salute--that is what they
are accustomed to."
After they had passed through the village street she paused at the end
of a short lane and looked up at him doubtfully.
"Would you--I wonder if you would like to go into a cottage," she
said.
"Go into a cottage?" he asked. "What cottage? What for?"
He had not the remotest idea of any reason why he should go into a
cottage inhabited by people who were entire strangers to him, and Miss
Alicia felt a trifle awkward at having to explain anything so wholly
natural.
"You see, they are your cottages, and the people are your tenants,
and--"
"But perhaps they mightn't like it. It might make 'em mad," he argued.
"If their water-pipes had busted, and they'd asked me to come and look
at them or anything; but they don't know me yet. They might think I
was Mr. Buttinski."
"I don't quite--" she began. "Buttinski is a foreign name; it sounds
Russian or Polish. I'm afraid I don't quite understand why they should
mistake you for him."
Then he laughed--a boyish shout of laughter which brought a cottager
to the nearest window to peep over the pots of fuchsias and geraniums
blooming profusely against the diamond panes.
"Say," he apologized, "don't be mad because I laughed. I'm laughing at
myself as much as at anything. It's a way of saying that they might
think I was 'butting in' too much-- pushing in where I wasn't asked.
See? I said they might think I was Mr. Butt-in-ski! It's just a bit of
fool slang. You're not mad, are you?"
"Oh, no!" she said. "Dear me! no. It is very funny, of course. I'm
afraid I'm extremely ignorant about--about foreign humor" It seemed
more delicate to say "foreign" than merely "American." But her gentle
little countenance for a few seconds wore a baffled expression, and
she said softly to herself, "Mr. Buttinski, Butt-in--to intrude. It
sounds quite Polish; I think even more Polish than Russian."
He was afraid he would yell with glee, but he did not. Herculean
effort enabled him to restrain his feelings, and present to her only
an ordinary-sized smile.
"I shouldn't know one from the other," he said; "but if you say it
sounds more Polish, I bet it does."
"Would you like to go into a cottage?" she inquired. "I think it might
be as well. They will like the attention."
"Will they? Of course I'll go if you think that. What shall I say?" he
asked somewhat anxiously.
"If you think the cottage looks clean, you might tell them so, and ask
a few questions about things. And you must be sure to inquire about
Susan Hibblethwaite's legs."
"What?" ejaculated Tembarom.
"Susan Hibblethwaite's legs," she replied in mild explanation. "Susan
is Mr. Hibblethwaite's unmarried sister, and she has very bad legs. It
is a thing one notices continually among village people, more
especially the women, that they complain of what they call `bad legs.'
I never quite know what they mean, whether it is rheumatism or
something different, but the trouble is always spoken of as `bad legs'
And they like you to inquire about them, so that they can tell you
their symptoms."
"Why don't they get them cured?"
"I don't know, I'm sure. They take a good deal of medicine when they
can afford it. I think they like to take it. They're very pleased when
the doctor gives them `a bottle o' summat,' as they call it. Oh, I
mustn't forget to tell you that most of them speak rather broad
Lancashire."
"Shall I understand them?" Tembarom asked, anxious again. "Is it a
sort of Dago talk?"
"It is the English the working-classes speak in Lancashire. 'Summat'
means 'something.' 'Whoam' means 'home.' But I should think you would
be very clever at understanding things."
"I'm scared stiff," said Tembarom, not in the least uncourageously;
"but I want to go into a cottage and hear some of it. Which one shall
we go into?"
There were several whitewashed cottages in the lane, each in its own
bit of garden and behind its own hawthorn hedge, now bare and wholly
unsuggestive of white blossoms and almond scent to the uninitiated.
Miss Alicia hesitated a moment.
"We will go into this one, where the Hibblethwaites live," she
decided. "They are quite clean, civil people. They have a naughty,
queer, little crippled boy, but I suppose they can't keep him in order
because he is an invalid. He's rather rude, I'm sorry to say, but he's
rather sharp and clever, too. He seems to lie on his sofa and collect
all the gossip of the village."
They went together up the bricked path, and Miss Alicia knocked at the
low door with her knuckles. A stout, apple-faced woman opened it,
looking a shade nervous.
"Good morning, Mrs. Hibblethwaite," said Miss Alicia in a kind but
remote manner. "The new Mr. Temple Barholm has been kind enough to
come to see you. It's very good of him to come so soon, isn't it?"
"It is that," Mrs. Hibblethwaite answered respectfully, looking him
over. "Wilt tha coom in, sir?"
Tembarom accepted the invitation, feeling extremely awkward because
Miss Alicia's initiatory comment upon his goodness in showing himself
had "rattled" him. It had made him feel that he must appear
condescending, and he had never condescended to any one in the whole
course of his existence. He had, indeed, not even been condescended
to. He had met with slanging and bullying, indifference and brutality
of manner, but he had not met with condescension.
"I hope you're well, Mrs. Hibblethwaite," he answered. "You look it."
"I deceive ma looks a good bit, sir," she answered. "Mony a day ma
legs is nigh as bad as Susan's."
"Tha 'rt jealous o' Susan's legs," barked out a sharp voice from a
corner by the fire.
The room had a flagged floor, clean with recent scrubbing with
sandstone; the whitewashed walls were decorated with pictures cut from
illustrated papers; there was a big fireplace, and by it was a hard-
looking sofa covered with blue- and-white checked cotton stuff. A boy
of about ten was lying on it, propped up with a pillow. He had a big
head and a keen, ferret-eyed face, and just now was looking round the
end of his sofa at the visitors. "Howd tha tongue, Tummas! " said his
mother. "I wunnot howd it," Tummas answered. "Ma tongue's th' on'y
thing about me as works right, an' I'm noan goin' to stop it."
"He's a young nowt," his mother explained; "but, he's a cripple, an'
we conna do owt wi' him."
"Do not be rude, Thomas," said Miss Alicia, with dignity.
"Dunnot be rude thysen," replied Tummas. "I'm noan o' thy lad."
Tembarom walked over to the sofa.
"Say," he began with jocular intent, "you've got a grouch on, ain't
you?"
Tummas turned on him eyes which bored. An analytical observer or a
painter might have seen that he had a burning curiousness of look, a
sort of investigatory fever of expression.
"I dunnot know what tha means," he said. "Happen tha'rt talkin'
'Merican?"
"That's just what it is," admitted Tembarom. " What are you talking?"
"Lancashire," said Tummas. "Theer's some sense i' that."
Tembarom sat down near him. The boy turned over against his pillow and
put his chin in the hollow of his palm and stared.
"I've wanted to see thee," he remarked. "I've made mother an' Aunt
Susan an' feyther tell me every bit they've heared about thee in the
village. Theer was a lot of it. Tha coom fro' 'Meriker?"
"Yes." Tembarom began vaguely to feel the demand in the burning
curiosity.
"Gi' me that theer book," the boy said, pointing to a small table
heaped with a miscellaneous jumble of things and standing not far from
him. "It's a' atlas," he added as Tembarom gave it to him. "Yo' con
find places in it." He turned the leaves until he found a map of the
world. "Theer's 'Meriker," he said, pointing to the United States.
"That theer's north and that theer's south. All th' real 'Merikens
comes from the North, wheer New York is."
"I come from New York," said Tembarom.
"Tha wert born i' th' workhouse, tha run about th' streets i' rags,
tha pretty nigh clemmed to death, tha blacked boots, tha sold
newspapers, tha feyther was a common workin'-mon-- and now tha's coom
into Temple Barholm an' sixty thousand a year."
"The last part's true all right," Tembarom owned, "but there's some
mistakes in the first part. I wasn't born in the workhouse, and though
I've been hungry enough, I never starved to death--if that's what
`clemmed' means."
Tummas looked at once disappointed and somewhat incredulous.
"That's th' road they tell it i' th' village," he argued.
"Well, let them tell it that way if they like it best. That's not
going to worry me," Tembarom replied uncombatively.
Tummas's eyes bored deeper into him.
"Does na tha care?" he demanded.
"What should I care for? Let every fellow enjoy himself his own way."
"Tha'rt not a bit like one o' th' gentry," said Tummas. "Tha'rt quite
a common chap. Tha'rt as common as me, for aw tha foine clothes."
"People are common enough, anyhow," said Tembarom. "There's nothing
much commoner, is there? There's millions of 'em everywhere --
billions of 'em. None of us need put on airs."
"Tha'rt as common as me," said Tummas, reflectively. "An' yet tha owns
Temple Barholm an' aw that brass. I conna mak' out how th' loike
happens."
"Neither can I; but it does all samee."
"It does na happen i' 'Meriker," exulted Tummas. "Everybody's equal
theer."
"Rats!" ejaculated Tembarom. "What about multimillionaires?"
He forgot that the age of Tummas was ten. It was impossible not to
forget it. He was, in fact, ten hundred, if those of his generation
had been aware of the truth. But there he sat, having spent only a
decade of his most recent incarnation in a whitewashed cottage,
deprived of the use of his legs.
Miss Alicia, seeing that Tembarom was interested in the boy, entered
into domestic conversation with Mrs. Hibblethwaite at the other side
of the room. Mrs. Hibblethwaite was soon explaining the uncertainty of
Susan's temper on wash-days, when it was necessary to depend on her
legs.
"Can't you walk at all?" Tembarom asked. Tummas shook his head. "How
long have you been lame?"
"Ever since I wur born. It's summat like rickets. I've been lyin' here
aw my days. I look on at foak an' think 'em over. I've got to do
summat. That's why I loike th' atlas. Little Ann Hutchinson gave it to
me onct when she come to see her grandmother."
Tembarom sat upright.
"Do you know her?" he exclaimed.
"I know her best o' onybody in th' world. An' I loike her best."
"So do I," rashly admitted Tembarom.
"Tha does?" Tummas asked suspiciously. "Does she loike thee?"
"She says she does." He tried to say it with proper modesty.
"Well, if she says she does, she does. An' if she does, then yo an'
me'll be friends." He stopped a moment, and seemed to be taking
Tembarom in with thoroughness. "I could get a lot out o' thee," he
said after the inspection.
"A lot of what?" Tembarom felt as though he would really like to hear.
"A lot o' things I want to know about. I wish I'd lived th' life tha's
lived, clemmin' or no clemmin'. Tha's seen things goin' on every day
o' thy loife."
"Well, yes, there's been plenty going on, plenty," Tembarom admitted.
"I've been lying here for ten year'," said Tummas, savagely. "An' I've
had nowt i' th' world to do an' nowt to think on but what I could mak'
foak tell me about th' village. But nowt happens but this chap gettin'
drunk an' that chap deein' or losin' his place, or wenches gettin'
married or havin' childer. I know everything that happens, but it's
nowt but a lot o' women clackin'. If I'd not been a cripple, I'd ha'
been at work for mony a year by now, 'arnin' money to save by an' go
to 'Meriker."
"You seem to be sort of stuck on America. How's that?"
"What dost mean?"
"I mean you seem to like it."
"I dunnot loike it nor yet not loike it, but I've heard a bit more
about it than I have about th' other places on th' map. Foak goes
there to seek their fortune, an' it seems loike there's a good bit
doin'."
"Do you like to read newspapers?" said Tembarom, inspired to his query
by a recollection of the vision of things "doin'" in the Sunday Earth.
"Wheer'd I get papers from?" the boy asked testily. "Foak like us
hasn't got th' brass for 'em."
"I'll bring you some New York papers," promised Tembarom, grinning a
little in anticipation. "And we'll talk about the news that's in them.
The Sunday Earth is full of pictures. I used to work on that paper
myself."
"Tha did?" Tummas cried excitedly. "Did tha help to print it, or was
it th' one tha sold i' th' streets?"
"I wrote some of the stuff in it."
"Wrote some of th' stuff in it? Wrote it thaself ? How could tha, a
common chap like thee?" he asked, more excited still, his ferret eyes
snapping.
"I don't know how I did it," Tembarom answered, with increased cheer
and interest in the situation. " It wasn't high-brow sort of work."
Tummas leaned forward in his incredulous eagerness.
"Does tha mean that they paid thee for writin' it--paid thee?"
"I guess they wouldn't have done it if they'd been Lancashire,
"Tembarom answered." But they hadn't much more sense than I had. They
paid me twenty-five dollars a week-- that's five pounds."
"I dunnot believe thee," said Tummas, and leaned back on his pillow
short of breath.
"I didn't believe it myself till I'd paid my board two weeks and
bought a suit of clothes with it," was Tembarom's answer, and he
chuckled as he made it.
But Tummas did believe it. This, after he had recovered from the
shock, became evident. The curiosity in his face intensified itself;
his eagerness was even vaguely tinged with something remotely
resembling respect. It was not, however, respect for the money which
had been earned, but for the store of things "doin'" which must have
been required. It was impossible that this chap knew things undreamed
of.
"Has tha ever been to th' Klondike ? " he asked after a long pause.
"No. I've never been out of New York."
Tummas seemed fretted and depressed.
"Eh, I'm sorry for that. I wished tha'd been to th' Klondike. I want
to be towd about it," he sighed. He pulled the atlas toward him and
found a place in it.
"That theer's Dawson," he announced. Tembarom saw that the region of
the Klondike had been much studied. It was even rather faded with the
frequent passage of searching fingers, as though it had been pored
over with special curiosity.
"There's gowd-moines theer," revealed Tummas. "An' theer's welly newt
else but snow an' ice. A young chap as set out fro' here to get theer
froze to death on th' way."
"How did you get to hear about it?"
"Ann she browt me a paper onet." He dug under his pillow, and brought
out a piece of newspaper, worn and frayed and cut with age and usage.
"This heer's what's left of it." Tembarom saw that it was a fragment
from an old American sheet and that a column was headed "The Rush for
the Klondike."
"Why didna tha go theer?" demanded Tummas. He looked up from his
fragment and asked his question with a sudden reflectiveness, as
though a new and interesting aspect of things had presented itself to
him.
"I had too much to do in New York," said Tembarom. "There's always
something doing in New York, you know."
Tummas silently regarded him a moment or so.
"It's a pity tha didn't go," he said." Happen tha'd never ha' coom
back."
Tembarom laughed the outright laugh.
"Thank you," he answered.
Tummas was still thinking the matter over and was not disturbed.
"I was na thinkin' o' thee," he said in an impersonal tone. "I was
thinkin' o' t' other chap. If tha'd gon i'stead o' him, he'd ha' been
here i'stead o' thee. Eh, but it's funny." And he drew a deep breath
like a sigh having its birth in profundity of baffled thought.
Both he and his evident point of view were "funny" in the Lancashire
sense, which does not imply humor, but strangeness and the
unexplainable. Singular as the phrasing was, Tembarom knew what he
meant, and that he was thinking of the oddity of chance. Tummas had
obviously heard of "poor Jem" and had felt an interest in him.
"You're talking about Jem Temple Barholm I guess," he said. Perhaps
the interest he himself had felt in the tragic story gave his voice a
tone somewhat responsive to Tummas's own mood, for Tummas, after one
more boring glance, let himself go. His interest in this special
subject was, it revealed itself, a sort of obsession. The history of
Jem Temple Barholm had been the one drama of his short life.
"Aye, I was thinkin' o' him," he said. "I should na ha' cared for th'
Klondike so much but for him."
"But he went away from England when you were a baby."
"Th' last toime he coom to Temple Barholm wur when I wur just born.
Foak said he coom to ax owd Temple Barholm if he'd help him to pay his
debts, an' th' owd chap awmost kicked him out o' doors. Mother had
just had me, an' she was weak an' poorly an' sittin' at th' door wi'
me in her arms, an' he passed by an' saw her. He stopped an' axed her
how she was doin'. An' when he was goin' away, he gave her a gold
sovereign, an' he says, `Put it in th' savin's-bank for him, an' keep
it theer till he's a big lad an' wants it.' It's been in th' savin's-
bank ever sin'. I've got a whole pound o' ma own out at interest.
There's not many lads ha' got that."
"He must have been a good-natured fellow," commented Tembarom. "It was
darned bad luck him going to the Klondike."
"It was good luck for thee," said Tummas, with resentment.
"Was it?" was Tembarom's unbiased reply. "Well, I guess it was, one
way or the other. I'm not kicking, anyhow."
Tummas naturally did not know half he meant. He went on talking about
Jem Temple Barholm, and as he talked his cheeks flushed and his eyes
lighted.
"I would na spend that sovereign if I was starvin'. I'm going to leave
it to Ann Hutchinson in ma will when I dee. I've axed questions about
him reet and left ever sin' I can remember, but theer's nobody knows
much. Mother says he was fine an' handsome, an' gentry through an'
through. If he'd coom into th' property, he'd ha' coom to see me again
I'll lay a shillin', because I'm a cripple an' I canna spend his
sovereign. If he'd coom back from th' Klondike, happen he'd ha' towd
me about it." He pulled the atlas toward him, and laid his thin finger
on the rubbed spot. "He mun ha' been killed somewheer about here," he
sighed. "Somewheer here. Eh, it's funny."
Tembarom watched him. There was something that rather gave you the
"Willies" in the way this little cripple seemed to have taken to the
dead man and worried along all these years thinking him over and
asking questions and studying up the Klondike because he was killed
there. It was because he'd made a kind of story of it. He'd enjoyed it
in the way people enjoy stories in a newspaper. You always had to give
'em a kind of story; you had to make a story even if you were telling
about a milk-wagon running away. In newspaper offices you heard that
was the secret of making good with what you wrote. Dish it up as if it
was a sort of story.
He not infrequently arrived at astute enough conclusions concerning
things. He had arrived at one now. Shut out even from the tame drama
of village life, Tummas, born with an abnormal desire for action and a
feverish curiosity, had hungered and thirsted for the story in any
form whatsoever. He caught at fragments of happenings, and colored and
dissected them for the satisfying of unfed cravings. The vanished man
had been the one touch of pictorial form and color in his ten years of
existence. Young and handsome and of the gentry, unfavored by the
owner of the wealth which some day would be his own possession,
stopping "gentry-way" at a cottage door to speak good-naturedly to a
pale young mother, handing over the magnificence of a whole sovereign
to be saved for a new-born child, going away to vaguely understood
disgrace, leaving his own country to hide himself in distant lands,
meeting death amid snow and ice and surrounded by gold-mines, leaving
his empty place to be filled by a boot-black newsboy--true there was
enough to lie and think over and to try to follow with the help of
maps and excited questions.
"I wish I could ha' seen him," said Tummas. "I'd awmost gi' my
sovereign to get a look at that picture in th' gallery at Temple
Barholm."
"What picture?" Tembarom asked. "Is there a picture of him there?"
"There is na one o' him, but there's one o' a lad as deed two hundred
year' ago as they say wur th' spit an' image on him when he wur a lad
hissen. One o' th' owd servants towd mother it wur theer."
This was a natural stimulus to interest and curiosity.
"Which one is it? Jinks! I'd like to see it myself. Do you know which
one it is? There's hundreds of them."
"No, I dunnot know," was Tummas's dispirited answer, "an' neither does
mother. Th' woman as knew left when owd Temple Barholm deed."
"Tummas," broke in Mrs. Hibblethwaite from the other end of the room,
to which she had returned after taking Miss Alicia out to complain
about the copper in the "wash-'us'--" "Tummas, tha'st been talkin'
like a magpie. Tha'rt a lot too bold an' ready wi' tha tongue. Th'
gentry's noan comin' to see thee if tha clacks th' heads off theer
showthers."
"I'm afraid he always does talk more than is good for him," said Miss
Alicia. "He looks quite feverish."
"He has been talking to me about Jem Temple Barholm," explained
Tembarom. "We've had a regular chin together. He thinks a heap of poor
Jem."
Miss Alicia looked startled, and Mrs. Hibblethwaite was plainly
flustered tremendously. She quite lost her temper.
"Eh," she exclaimed, "tha wants tha young yed knocked off, Tummas
Hibblethwaite. He's fair daft about th' young gentleman as--as was
killed. He axes questions mony a day till I'd give him th' stick if he
wasna a cripple. He moithers me to death."
"I'll bring you some of those New York papers to look at," Tembarom
said to the boy as he went away.
He walked back through the village to Temple Barholm, holding Miss
Alicia's elbow in light, affectionate guidance and support, a little
to her embarrassment and also a little to her delight. Until he had
taken her into the dining-room the night before she had never seen
such a thing done. There was no over- familiarity in the action. It
merely seemed somehow to suggest liking and a wish to take care of
her.
"That little fellow in the village," he said after a silence in which
it occurred to her that he seemed thoughtful, "what a little freak he
is! He's got an idea that there's a picture in the gallery that's said
to look like Jem Temple Barholm when he was a boy. Have you ever heard
anything about it? He says a servant told his mother it was there."
"Yes, there is one," Miss Alicia answered. "I sometimes go and look at
it. But it makes me feel very sad. It is the handsome boy who was a
page in the court of Charles II. He died in his teens. His name was
Miles Hugo Charles James. Jem could see the likeness himself.
Sometimes for a little joke I used to call him Miles Hugo."
"I believe I remember him," said Tembarom. "I believe I asked Palford
his name. I must go and have a look at him again. He hadn't much
better luck than the fellow that looked like him, dying as young as
that."
CHAPTER XVII
Form, color, drama, and divers other advantages are necessary to the
creation of an object of interest. Presenting to the world none of
these assets, Miss Alicia had slipped through life a scarcely remarked
unit. No little ghost of prettiness had attracted the wandering eye,
no suggestion of agreeable or disagreeable power of self-assertion had
arrested attention. There had been no hour in her life when she had
expected to count as being of the slightest consequence. When she had
knocked at the door of the study at Rowcroft Vicarage, and "dear papa"
had exclaimed irritably: "Who is that? Who is that?" she had always
replied, "It is only Alicia."
This being the case, her gradual awakening to the singularity of her
new situation was mentally a process full of doubts and sometimes of
alarmed bewilderments. If in her girlhood a curate, even a curate with
prominent eyes and a receding chin, had proposed to her that she
should face with him a future enriched by the prospect of being called
upon to bring up a probable family of twelve on one hundred and fifty
pounds a year, with both parish and rectory barking and snapping at
her worn-down heels, she would have been sure to assert tenderly that
she was afraid she was "not worthy." This was the natural habit of
her mind, and in the weeks which followed the foggy afternoon when
Tembarom "staked out his claim" she dwelt often upon her unworthiness
of the benefits bestowed upon her.
First the world below-stairs, then the village, and then the county
itself awoke to the fact that the new Temple Temple Barholm had "taken
her up." The first tendency of the world below-stairs was to resent
the unwarranted uplifting of a person whom there had been a certain
luxury in regarding with disdain and treating with scarcely veiled
lack of consideration. To be able to do this with a person who, after
all was said and done, was not one of the servant class, but a sort of
lady of birth, was not unstimulating. And below-stairs the sense of
personal rancor against "a 'anger-on" is strong. The meals served in
Miss Alicia's remote sitting-room had been served at leisure, her tea
had rarely been hot, and her modestly tinkled bell irregularly
answered. Often her far from liberally supplied fire had gone out on
chilly days, and she had been afraid to insist on its being relighted.
Her sole defense against inattention would have been to complain to
Mr. Temple Barholm, and when on one occasion a too obvious neglect had
obliged her to gather her quaking being together in mere self- respect
and say, "If this continues to occur, William, I shall be obliged to
speak to Mr. Temple Barholm," William had so looked at her and so ill
hid a secret smile that it had been almost tantamount to his saying,
"I'd jolly well like to see you."
And now! Sitting at the end of the table opposite him, if you please!
Walking here and walking there with him! Sitting in the library or
wherever he was, with him talking and laughing and making as much of
her as though she were an aunt with a fortune to leave, and with her
making as free in talk as though at liberty to say anything that came
into her head! Well, the beggar that had found himself on horseback
was setting another one galloping alongside of him. In the midst of
this natural resentment it was "a bit upsetting," as Burrill said, to
find it dawning upon one that absolute exactness of ceremony was as
much to be required for "her" as for "him." Miss Alicia had long felt
secretly sure that she was spoken of as "her" in the servants' hall.
That businesslike sharpness which Palford had observed in his client
aided Tembarom always to see things without illusions. He knew that
There was no particular reason why his army of servants should regard
him for the present as much more than an intruder; but he also knew
that if men and women had employment which was not made hard for them,
and were well paid for doing, they were not anxious to lose it, and
the man who paid their wages might give orders with some certainty of
finding them obeyed. He was "sharp" in more ways than one. He observed
shades he might have been expected to overlook. He observed a certain
shade in the demeanor of the domestics when attending Miss Alicia, and
it was a shade which marked a difference between service done for her
and service done for himself. This was only at the outset, of course,
when the secret resentment was felt; but he observed it, mere shade
though it was.
He walked out into the hall after Burrill one morning. Not having yet
adjusted himself to the rule that when one wished to speak to a man
one rang a bell and called him back, fifty times if necessary, he
walked after Burrill and stopped him.
"This is a pretty good place for servants, ain't it?" he said.
"Yes, sir."
"Good pay, good food, not too much to do?"
"Certainly, sir," Burrill replied, somewhat disturbed by a casualness
which yet suggested a method of getting at something or other.
"You and the rest of them don't want to change, do you?"
"No, sir. There is no complaint whatever as far as I have heard."
"That's all right." Mr. Temple Barholm had put his hands into his
pockets, and stood looking non-committal in a steady sort of way.
"There's something I want the lot of you to get on to--right away.
Miss Temple Barholm is going to stay here. She's got to have
everything just as she wants it. She's got to be pleased. She's the
lady of the house. See?"
"I hope, sir," Burrill said with professional dignity, "that Miss
Temple Barholm has not had reason to express any dissatisfaction."
"I'm the one that would express it--quick," said Tembarom. "She
wouldn't have time to get in first. I just wanted to make sure I
shouldn't have to do it. The other fellows are under you. You've got a
head on your shoulders, I guess. It's up to you to put 'em on to it.
That's all."
"Thank you, sir," said Burrill.
His master went back into the library smiling genially, and Burrill
stood still a moment or so gazing at the door he closed behind him.
Be sure the village, and finally circles not made up of cottagers,
heard of this, howsoever mysteriously. Miss Alicia was not aware that
the incident had occurred. She could not help observing, however, that
the manners of the servants of the household curiously improved; also,
when she passed through the village, that foreheads were touched
without omission and the curtseys of playing children were prompt.
When she dropped into a cottage, housewives polished off the seats of
chairs vigorously before offering them, and symptoms and needs were
explained with a respectful fluency which at times almost suggested
that she might be relied on to use influence.
"I'm afraid I have done the village people injustice," she said
leniently to Tembarom. "I used to think them so disrespectful and
unappreciative. I dare say it was because I was so troubled myself.
I'm afraid one's own troubles do sometimes make one unfair."
"Well, yours are over," said Tembarom. "And so are mine as long as you
stay by me."
Never had Miss Alicia been to London. She had remained, as was
demanded of her by her duty to dear papa, at Rowcroft, which was in
Somersetshire. She had only dreamed of London, and had had fifty-five
years of dreaming. She had read of great functions, and seen pictures
of some of them in the illustrated papers. She had loyally endeavored
to follow at a distance the doings of her Majesty,-- she always spoke
of Queen Victoria reverentially as "her Majesty,"--she rejoiced when a
prince or a princess was born or christened or married, and believed
that a "drawing-room" was the most awe-inspiring, brilliant, and
important function in the civilized world, scarcely second to
Parliament. London--no one but herself or an elderly gentlewoman of
her type could have told any one the nature of her thoughts of London.
Let, therefore, those of vivid imagination make an effort to depict to
themselves the effect produced upon her mind by Tembarom's casually
suggesting at breakfast one morning that he thought it might be rather
a good "stunt" for them to run up to London. By mere good fortune she
escaped dropping the egg she had just taken from the egg-stand.
"London!" she said. "Oh!"
"Pearson thinks it would be a first-rate idea," he explained. "I guess
he thinks that if he can get me into the swell clothing stores he can
fix me up as I ought to be fixed, if I'm not going to disgrace him. I
should hate to disgrace Pearson. Then he can see his girl, too, and I
want him to see his girl."
"Is--Pearson--engaged?" she asked; but the thought which was repeating
itself aloud to her was "London! London!"
"He calls it 'keeping company,' or 'walking out,'" Tembarom answered.
"She's a nice girl, and he's dead stuck on her. Will you go with me,
Miss Alicia?"
"Dear Mr. Temple Barholm," she fluttered, "to visit London would be a
privilege I never dreamed it would be my great fortune to enjoy--
never."
"Good business!" he ejaculated delightedly. "That's luck for me. It
gave me the blues--what I saw of it. But if you are with me, I'll bet
it'll be as different as afternoon tea was after I got hold of you.
When shall we start? To-morrow?"
Her sixteen-year-old blush repeated itself.
"I feel so sorry. It seems almost undignified to mention it, but--I
fear I should not look smart enough for London. My wardrobe is so very
limited. I mustn't," she added with a sweet effort at humor, "do the
new Mr. Temple Barholm discredit by looking unfashionable."
He was more delighted than before.
"Say," he broke out, "I'll tell you what we'll do: we'll go together
and buy everything 'suitable' in sight. The pair of us'll come back
here as suitable as Burrill and Pearson. We'll paint the town red."
He actually meant it. He was like a boy with a new game. His sense of
the dreariness of London had disappeared. He knew what it would be
like with Miss Alicia as a companion. He had really seen nothing of
the place himself, and he would find out every darned thing worth
looking at, and take her to see it-- theaters, shops, every show in
town. When they left the breakfast-table it was agreed upon that they
would make the journey the following day.
He did not openly refer to the fact that among the plans for their
round of festivities he had laid out for himself the attending to one
or two practical points. He was going to see Palford, and he had made
an appointment with a celebrated nerve specialist. He did not discuss
this for several reasons. One of them was that his summing up of Miss
Alicia was that she had had trouble enough to think over all her
little life, and the thing for a fellow to do for her, if he liked
her, was to give her a good time and make her feel as if she was at a
picnic right straight along--not let her even hear of a darned thing
that might worry her. He had said comparatively little to her about
Strangeways. His first mention of his condition had obviously made her
somewhat nervous, though she had been full of kindly interest. She was
in private not sorry that it was felt better that she should not
disturb the patient by a visit to his room. The abnormality of his
condition seemed just slightly alarming to her.
"But, oh, how good, how charitable, you are!" she had murmured.
"Good," he answered, the devout admiration of her tone rather puzzling
him. "It ain't that. I just want to see the thing through. I dropped
into it by accident, and then I dropped into this by accident, and
that made it as easy as falling off a log. I believe he's going to get
well sometime. I guess I kind of like him because he holds on to me so
and believes I'm just It. Maybe it's because I'm stuck on myself."
His visit to Strangeways was longer than usual that afternoon. He
explained the situation to him so that he understood it sufficiently
not to seem alarmed by it. This was one of the advances Tembarom had
noticed recently, that he was less easily terrified, and seemed
occasionally to see facts in their proper relation to one another.
Sometimes the experiments tried on him were successful, sometimes they
were not, but he never resented them.
"You are trying to help me to remember," he said once. "I think you
will sometime."
"Sure I will," said Tembarom. "You're better every day."
Pearson was to remain in charge of him until toward the end of the
London visit. Then he was to run up for a couple of days, leaving in
his place a young footman to whom the invalid had become accustomed.
The visit to London was to Miss Alicia a period of enraptured
delirium. The beautiful hotel in which she was established, the
afternoons at the Tower, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the
evenings at the play, during which one saw the most brilliant and
distinguished actors, the mornings in the shops, attended as though
one were a person of fortune, what could be said of them? And the
sacred day on which she saw her Majesty drive slowly by, glittering
helmets, splendid uniforms, waving plumes, and clanking swords
accompanying and guarding her, and gentlemen standing still with their
hats off, and everybody looking after her with that natural touch of
awe which royalty properly inspires! Miss Alicia's heart beat rapidly
in her breast, and she involuntarily made a curtsey as the great lady
in mourning drove by. She lost no shade of any flavor of ecstatic
pleasure in anything, and was to Tembarom, who knew nothing about
shades and flavors, indeed a touching and endearing thing.
He had never got so much out of anything. If Ann had just been there,
well, that would have been the limit. Ann was on her way to America
now, and she wouldn't write to him or let him write to her. He had to
make a fair trial of it. He could find out only in that way, she said.
It was not to be denied that the youth and longing in him gave him
some half-hours to face which made him shut himself up in his room and
stare hard at the wall, folding his arms tightly as he tilted his
chair.
There arrived a day when one of the most exalted shops in Bond Street
was invaded by an American young man of a bearing the peculiarities of
which were subtly combined with a remotely suggested air of knowing
that if he could find what he wanted, there was no doubt as to his
power to get it. What he wanted was not usual, and was explained with
a frankness which might have seemed unsophisticated, but, singularly,
did not. He wanted to have a private talk with some feminine power in
charge, and she must be some one who knew exactly what ladies ought to
have.
Being shown into a room, such a feminine power was brought to him and
placed at his service. She was a middle-aged person, wearing
beautifully fitted garments and having an observant eye and a
dignified suavity of manner. She looked the young American over with a
swift inclusion of all possibilities. He was by this time wearing
extremely well-fitting garments himself, but she was at once aware
that his tailored perfection was a new thing to him.
He went to his point without apologetic explanation.
"You know all the things any kind of a lady ought to have," he said--
"all the things that would make any one feel comfortable and as if
they'd got plenty? Useful things as well as ornamental ones?"
"Yes, sir," she replied, with rising interest. "I have been in the
establishment thirty years."
"Good business," Tembarom replied. Already he felt relieved. "I've got
a relation, a little old lady, and I want her to fix herself out just
as she ought to be fixed. Now, what I'm afraid of is that she won't
get everything she ought to unless I manage it for her somehow
beforehand. She's got into a habit of-- well, economizing. Now the
time's past for that, and I want her to get everything a woman like
you would know she really wants, so that she could look her best,
living in a big country house, with a relation that thinks a lot of
her."
He paused a second or so, and then went further, fixing a clear and
astonishingly shrewd eye upon the head of the department listening to
him.
"I found out this was a high-class place," he explained. "I made sure
of that before I came in. In a place that was second or third class
there might be people who'd think they'd caught a 'sucker' that would
take anything that was unloaded on to him, because he didn't know. The
things are for Miss Temple Barholm, and she DOES know. I shall ask her
to come here herself to-morrow morning, and I want you to take care of
her, and show her the best you've got that's suitable." He seemed to
like the word; he repeated it--"Suitable," and quickly restrained a
sudden, unexplainable, wide smile.
The attending lady's name was Mrs. Mellish. Thirty years' experience
had taught her many lessons. She was a hard woman and a sharp one, but
beneath her sharp hardness lay a suppressed sense of the perfect in
taste. To have a customer with unchecked resources put into her hands
to do her best by was an inspiring incident. A quiver of enlightenment
had crossed her countenance when she had heard the name of Temple
Barholm. She had a newspaper knowledge of the odd Temple Barholm
story. This was the next of kin who had blacked boots in New York, and
the obvious probability that he was a fool, if it had taken the form
of a hope, had been promptly nipped in the bud. The type from which he
was furthest removed was that of the fortune-intoxicated young man who
could be obsequiously flattered into buying anything which cost money
enough.
"Not a thing's to be unloaded on her that she doesn't like," he added,
"and she's not a girl that goes to pink teas. She's a--a--lady --and
not young--and used to quiet ways."
The evidently New York word "unload" revealed him to his hearer as by
a flash, though she had never heard it before.
"We have exactly the things which will be suitable, sir," she said. "I
think I quite understand." Tembarom smiled again, and, thanking her,
went away still smiling, because he knew Miss Alicia was safe.
There were of course difficulties in the way of persuading Miss Alicia
that her duty lay in the direction of spending mornings in the most
sumptuous of Bond Street shops, ordering for herself an entire
wardrobe on a basis of unlimited resources. Tembarom was called upon
to employ the most adroitly subtle reasoning, entirely founded on his
"claim" and her affectionate willingness to give him pleasure.
He really made love to her in the way a joyful young fellow can make
love to his mother or his nicest aunt. He made her feel that she
counted for so much in his scheme of enjoyment that to do as he asked
would be to add a glow to it.
"And they won't spoil you," he said. "The Mellish woman that's the
boss has promised that. I wouldn't have you spoiled for a farm," he
added heartily.
And he spoke the truth. If he had been told that he was cherishing her
type as though it were a priceless bit of old Saxe, he would have
stared blankly and made a jocular remark. But it was exactly this
which he actually clung to and adored. He even had a second private
interview with Mrs. Mellish, and asked her to "keep her as much like
she was" as was possible.
Stimulated by the suppressed touch of artistic fervor, Mrs. Mellish
guessed at something even before her client arrived; but the moment
she entered the showroom all was revealed to her at once. The very
hint of flush and tremor in Miss Alicia's manner was an assistance.
Surrounded by a small and extremely select court composed of Mrs.
Mellish and two low-voiced, deft-handed assistants, it was with a fine
little effort that Miss Alicia restrained herself from exterior
suggestion of her feeling that there was something almost impious in
thinking of possessing the exquisite stuffs and shades displayed to
her in flowing beauty on every side. Such linens and batistes and
laces, such delicate, faint grays and lavenders and soft-falling
blacks! If she had been capable of approaching the thought, such
luxury might even have hinted at guilty splendor.
Mrs. Mellish became possessed of an "idea" To create the costume of an
exquisite, early-Victorian old lady in a play done for the most
fashionable and popular actor manager of the most "drawing-room" of
West End theaters, where one saw royalty in the royal box, with
bouquets on every side, the orchestra breaking off in the middle of a
strain to play "God Save the Queen," and the audience standing up as
the royal party came in -- that was her idea. She carried it out,
steering Miss Alicia with finished tact through the shoals and rapids
of her timidities. And the result was wonderful; color,--or, rather,
shades, -- textures, and forms were made subservient by real genius.
Miss Alicia -- as she was turned out when the wardrobe was complete --
might have been an elderly little duchess of sweet and modest good
taste in the dress of forty years earlier. It took time, but some of
the things were prepared as though by magic, and the night the first
boxes were delivered at the hotel Miss Alicia, on going to bed, in
kneeling down to her devotions prayed fervently that she might not be
"led astray by fleshly desires," and that her gratitude might be
acceptable, and not stained by a too great joy "in the things which
corrupt."
The very next day occurred Rose. She was the young person to whom
Pearson was engaged, and it appeared that if Miss Alicia would make up
her mind to oblige Mr. Temple Barholm by allowing the girl to come to
her as lady's-maid, even if only temporarily, she would be doing a
most kind and charitable thing. She was a very nice, well-behaved
girl, and unfortunately she had felt herself forced to leave her place
because her mistress's husband was not at all a nice man. He had shown
himself so far from nice that Pearson had been most unhappy, and Rose
had been compelled to give notice, though she had no other situation
in prospect and her mother was dependent on her. This was without
doubt not Mr. Temple Barholm's exact phrasing of the story, but it was
what Miss Alicia gathered, and what moved her deeply. It was so cruel
and so sad! That wicked man! That poor girl! She had never had a
lady's-maid, and might be rather at a loss at first, but it was only
like Mr. Temple Barholm's kind heart to suggest such a way of helping
the girl and poor Pearson.
So occurred Rose, a pretty creature whose blue eyes suppressed
grateful tears as she took Miss Alicia's instructions during their
first interview. And Pearson arrived the same night, and, waiting upon
Tembarom, stood before him, and with perfect respect, choked.
"Might I thank you, if you please, sir," he began, recovering himself-
-"might I thank you and say how grateful--Rose and me, sir--" and
choked again.
"I told you it would be all right," answered Tembarom. "It is all
right. I wish I was fixed like you are, Pearson."
When the Countess of Mallowe called, Rose had just dressed Miss Alicia
for the afternoon in one of the most perfect of the evolutions of Mrs.
Mellish's idea. It was a definite creation, as even Lady Mallowe
detected the moment her eyes fell upon it. Its hue was dull, soft
gray, and how it managed to concede points and elude suggestions of
modes interred, and yet remain what it did remain, and accord
perfectly with the side ringlets and the lace cap of Mechlin, only
dressmaking genius could have explained. The mere wearing of it gave
Miss Alicia a support and courage which she could scarcely believe to
be her own. When the cards of Lady Mallowe and Lady Joan Fayre were
brought up to her, she was absolutely not really frightened; a little
nervous for a moment, perhaps, but frightened, no. A few weeks of
relief and ease, of cheery consideration, of perfectly good treatment
and good food and good clothes, had begun a rebuilding of the actual
cells of her.
Lady Mallowe entered alone. She was a handsome person, and
astonishingly young when considered as the mother of a daughter of
twenty-seven. She wore a white veil, and looked pink through it. She
swept into the room, and shook hands with Miss Alicia with delicate
warmth.
"We do not really know each other at all," she said. "It is
disgraceful how little relatives see of one another."
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